On January 28th, Health and Wellness Minister Ron Liepert announced that Australian health economist and academic Stephen J. Duckett would become the new President and CEO of the Board as of March 23rd.
“Dr. Duckett is a highly recognized health care expert, we look forward to working with him,” said UNA President Heather Smith.
“We are heartened to see that Dr. Duckett has frequently published scholarly papers on the advantages of public health care systems over private, for-profit systems,” she noted. “We hope Dr. Duckett will dedicate himself to strengthening Alberta’s universal, public health system.”
Duckett has published arguments in support of public systems widely, including in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, where he said, “The Australian experience suggests that Canadians should be wary about allowing a significant private sector to develop in Canada, particularly if it seeks the level of subsidy that the Australian private sector has been able to garner.” (CMAJ, 2005).
Most recently Duckett was appointed in 2005 to head up a $6.3 billion plan to reform the Queensland State’s health system in Australia.
However, it should also be noted that Duckett was a former head of the federal and Victorian health departments and architect of the casemix model of hospital funding.
The casemix model is similar to patient-focused funding and to “payment-by-results” which was widely adopted in Britain. Currently most Canadian public health services are funded through global annual or multi-year budgets. Alberta and other Canadian provinces are toying with moving to some form of “activity-based funding” which Canadian health policy expert Colleen Fuller refers to as “piecework” and other doctors have called “fee-for-service hospitals”.
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