Guess what?
Lab and x-ray service is staying in Flower’s Cove.
Former finance minister Jerome Kennedy announced the decision today on voice of the cabinet minister’s morning call-in show.
The Tory candidate must not be doing too well in the by-election.
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Even in Paul Oram’s political death, he and Danny Williams can’t get on the same page.
Asked about Oram’s resignation, Danny Williams told reporters that when it comes to an individual’s health and family, he doesn’t even try and convince someone to stay. “I just accept it,” said Williams.
But that’s not what Paul says. As the Gander Beacon put it:
Mr. Oram said the premier asked whether he would consider staying on as an MHA, but he said he felt if he was going to walk away from one aspect of his work, he would prefer to fully remove himself from politics.
"I just felt that if I needed to regain control of my life, I had to walk away from politics altogether."
That’s not the first time that Oram and Williams have been at odds.
On the same day in early September – before Oram’s surprise resignation - Williams said the decision on cutting lab and x-ray services was made months earlier, long before Oram became minister.
Williams told a scrum that Lewisporte MHA Wade Verge knew of the cuts some time before July 9, 2009. Williams indicated Verge had the information from both Williams’ chief of staff and from Ross Wiseman when the latter was still health minister.
Oram told the House of Assembly - at almost the same time Williams was talking to reporters at another location - that he made the decision after meeting with concerned citizens in Lewisporte in mid-August.
None of the dates match up since letters released by Oram in early September were part of the pre-budget process. They were dated in February 2009.
But now even Danny Williams can’t get it straight.
According to the Northern Pen, the Beacon’s sister newspaper, a campaigning Danny Williams said something completely different from his earlier versions:
"Paul Oram had proceeded on the basis of recommendations made to him by the health authority," stated Premier Williams.
Not only did Oram now supposedly make a decisions Williams earlier attributed to someone else but the health authorities actually didn’t make the recommendations. They were simply asked for options to save money, money that – as it turned out – they actually never had to save anyway.
No wonder some people don’t trust some politicians.
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Just to recap:
So the Lewisporte health care centre started out as a chronic care and acute care centre at a cost of $22 million.
Then it ballooned to $42 million even before anything got built.
Paul Oram told us all before he quit that government – i.e. cabinet, which presumably includes Jerome and Danny – chopped out all the acute care bits and cut the building cost to $32 million.
That acute care bit included lab and x-ray.
And because the building cost of the project mushroomed and then got cut, the same people decided to slice $200,000 out of the operating budget.
So basically, even before anything got built, lab and x-ray would disappear and would stay disappeared even if nothing got built at all.
And now, even after slicing the building cost to $32 million by eliminating all the acute care stuff, one of the guys who made the cut decision in the first place is now asking the local concerned citizens community to help him find another $2.0 million in cuts so that maybe he’ll give them back the $200,000.
Uh huh.
So the whole thing comes down to finding $2.0 million in savings in a project which already went 110% over budget before anyone could blink and which is still 50% over budget.
Riiiiight.
And so when that $2.0 million disappears in further cost over-runs, what happens then?
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One of the little stories that seemed to sail past most people was a report that three of the province’s four regional health authorities will finish the year with balanced budgets.
"The light bill goes up, the phone bill goes up, the oil bill goes up — that type thing," said Western Health finance committee member Tom O'Brien. "We submitted that to the government and [government] approved our budget with those inflationary numbers in it. So we'll have a balanced budget for 2009-2010.
The only one that wouldn’t is Eastern Health but given some of the issues involved, that’s understandable.
But Labrador-Grenfell, Western and Central expect to balance their books by year end.
Last spring, Labrador-Grenfell Health estimated it would end its fiscal year with a $2-million deficit, but officials said Wednesday that's no longer the case.
"We have had a greater success in recruiting staff, with a greater number of nurses on staff that actually cuts down on our cost of providing services," CEO Boyd Rowe said. "When we don't have adequate numbers of staff, we end up paying a considerable amount of overtime."
How odd then that earlier this month health minister Paul Oram announced that government had decided to cut laboratory and x-ray service in Flower’s Cove and Lewisporte. he claimed the government needed to save money and that the cuts had been recommended by the health authorities involved.
Sure those two ideas were among dozens tossed out by all four regional health authorities back in February as possible cuts when they were asked - hypothetically – what they could do to balance their budgets if they got funding frozen at 2008 levels.
But if the books are balanced the cuts weren’t necessary.
And if there was a problem with the government health budget generally, then surely it would have made more sense to do some serious thinking and announce a wide range of options with the new budget in the spring. There was no rush to chop in September if things were okay and certainly there’d be no reason to cut only two.
That’s what one would expect from a government that generally practices sound financial management based on a genuinely strategic approach. That was the logical implication when Oram acknowledged what many have known for some time, namely that the current administration has been spending wildly, spending public money in a way that – in Oram’s word was “unsustainable.”
Such a government would not engage in seemingly capricious, apparently ill-considered and curious, bizarre cuts that seem to bear no connection to anything. Heck they aren’t even connected to a review of laboratory and x-ray service which isn’t even completed yet.
Such decisions would seem driven by something other than sound reasoning, logic, and a firm grasp of the whole picture. They’d seem panicky. They’d seem irrational, perchance even stupid given the political fall-out that’s resulted across the northern coast of Newfoundland.
And it would seem even more irrational, capricious, certainly foolishly stubborn and – yes maybe even stupid – to persist in the irrational and apparently unnecessary cuts on those two communities once the backlash started and the overall financial picture was shown to be something other than dire.
Events of the past couple of weeks make you wonder what is really going on inside the provincial government. What is the real story behind the Flower’s Cove and Lewisporte cuts.
Was there more to Trevor’s departure than meets the eye? Was there something to be found in his comment to Randy Simms the other morning that we are facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? Taylor was known to speak bluntly and he certainly never spouted the “we are living in a bubble” rhetoric.
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the good people of Newfoundland and Labrador would look on another administration and wonder what was going on. Things sometimes didn’t make sense.
The good people would stare in bewilderment since the leader was known to be a political mastermind. Surely there had to be some Mensa answer they would rationalize, an idea incomprehensible to mere mortals as to why such bizarre things were occurring.
Even went things looked insane they figured there had to be a plan behind it all. No one had to tell them that at a board of trade speech; they knew it already.
Yet, despite their faith, they remained perplexed.
Uneasy.
Unsettled.
Disquieted.
Your humble e-scribbler would suggest to these people that they think about the issue again, and about their conclusion, with one tiny difference:
Merely look on events without the assumption that there was some inscrutable genius at work.
Then look again at the conclusion they reached.
Invariably, inevitably, predictably, at the point they reached a conclusion once again – devoid of the assumed secret and unknown brilliance – their faces turned ashen.
And they would go very quiet.
Quiet isn’t a word you’d use these days in some parts of Newfoundland and Labrador, is it? Places where the Great Tory Revolution supposedly started.
That must be a very uncomfortable thought for some people.
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While everyone is talking about the removal of laboratory and x-ray services from Lewisporte, a much larger cut seems to have escaped public attention.
The proposed redevelopment of the chronic care centre at North haven Manor was supposed to include acute care facilities as well. The original budgeted cost was $20 million.
When people started to complain about the lab and x-ray business, the initial government response from no less a personage than the local member of the legislature was that people should be mindful of the $30 million health centre that was coming to town.
Now a 50% cost over-run sounded bad enough, the more accurate version of the whole story is found in the local newspaper – the Lewisporte Packet – from August 12.
Turns out that the original concept had ballooned in cost to $42 million. Not so much as a single shovel had been soiled by local mud and the thing had jumped 110% in cost. The provincial government’s response was to hack out most if not all of the acute care facilities, bringing the cost down to the low 30s.
"The one-roof health facility project was estimated to be around $20 million. It escalated to be about $40 million, in fact over $40 million," Mr. Oram explained. "As a government we had to look at where our priorities lie and we had to prioritize based on the identified needs.
"The project is still going to be - from our estimates - around $30 million for North Haven Manor and some other components as well. There's no way to keep it under $30 million to do what we want to do there and to meet the needs that we see as being in the Lewisporte area - this is the amount of money we are going to have to spend to do it."
The slash to laboratory and x-ray facilities was on top of that $12 million cut.
If all that weren’t bad enough, the story is already widening.
Health minister Paul Oram is taking it in the head for the way the information on the x-ray and lab changes was released in the first place, let alone the way the new information flopped out last Friday.
The letters released last Friday have given risen to concerns in other communities that cuts are coming there as well. But even in trying to allay concerns, the health minister just made matters worse: all health regions were asked to identify cuts, according to Oram.
Now what he said is absolutely true but in the context, he is only adding gasoline to his own backside. In his initial bluster, Oram stated clearly that further changes – always read as cuts – are coming.
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Related: “Much less for may more for St. Anthony”
Just a few observations on announcements from the province’s health ministry lately.
1. labradore points out that others – like the local news media - are noticing the odd but telling similarity between the Lewisporte cuts announcement and the one from Eastern Health about breast cancer back in April.
So much for the story then and now that it was all up to the local health authority.
2. During Cameron, every senior government witness insisted that all the decisions were made by the people at the health authority because that’s what they do; ministers of health and cabinet did not get involved in operational issues.
Like say, deciding whether to shut down laboratory and x-ray services.
Who decided on an operational issue in the Lewisporte case?
Hint: it wasn’t the regional health authorities. They found out about the cut the morning it was announced.
3. And how many times will a cabinet minister refer to the recommendations of the Cameron Inquiry in trying to justify the operational decision made in Lewisporte?
4. Then there’s the claim by no less a personage than the Premier that the cuts came from the health authorities and that it was aimed at improving the system.
He claims the health authority made a recommendation “to us” for services that should be cut.
He leaves out the important bit, of course, that the health authority didn’t come up with this idea on their own. They suggested cuts only when prompted by a request from the health department to suggest cuts in the first place.
And the cuts had nothing to do with either offsetting the cost of the health centre in Lewisporte (as the Friday release claims) or “improving” the system.
That’s plain from the letters released by government late on Friday.
But don’t take my word for it: Read them for yourself.
5. And since we are in the questioning mood: why would a provincial government that is evidently flush with billions in loose change ask for recommendations on what to cut from health budgets in the first place, especially when the sum finally settled on by - whom? cabinet, the Premier, definitely Paul Oram – was such a measly, miserable amount?
And that’s based on nothing more than the general political principle that you just don’t go out and randomly shoot off a body part when you don’t need to.
Cuts make people upset.
Cuts to health care make lots of people really upset.
Burn ‘em at the stake kinda upset.
And they don’t get un-upset easily.
Un-upsetting them will be costly either in blood and/or treasure: cash or in political strips taken off someone’s hide.
Therefore, as the political wisdom would suggest: do NOT cut health care unless it is absolutely necessary.
So why in the name of all that is political and therefore unholy would any cabinet in its right mind ask health regions to recommend a list of slashes, some of them valued at upwards of a million bucks.
6. When did they make the decisions? Observers of government will note the date on the letters released on Friday is from early 2009, well into the budget cycle and long after decisions would normally be made. People will start asking hard questions about when all this was decided. Evidently it wasn’t in August.
7. There is no plan. And when all that is done, ask yourself why a government department would release letters that show their initial talking points were more composed at the Mad hatter’s tea party?
Usually you release evidence that backs your claim, not further hints that – contrary to the Premier’s claims at the bored of trayed last week - people in the departments of government have no idea what they are doing.
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As a sharp-eared reader picked up, the raw video of the Premier’s scrum revealed that Lewisporte MHA Wade Verge knew about cuts to health service in his district some time before July 9, 2009.
That’s the day Premier Danny Williams shuffled Ross Wiseman out of health and moved Paul Oram in.
The decision wasn’t announced until August 31, almost two months later. And even then, some people claim, the wording of the news release didn’t make plain what was happening in the affected communities.
The regional health authorities involved didn’t hear about the changes until the morning they were announced.
But even that is now at odds with comments by health minister Paul Oram. Under questioning in the House of Assembly on Wednesday, Oram said the decision was made after a trip he made to the region to discuss the issue with local officials:
The fact is that this decision was made during discussions, Mr. Speaker, with Central Health and Community Services, also with discussions that we had ongoing with the community. The fact of the matter is, we went out to Lewisporte, and we told them very clearly that this facility would not be built or put inside of the new facility. We would not have X-ray and lab inside of the new facility. That is exactly what we told them, Mr. Speaker. They understood where we were coming from and we moved forward on that basis.
SOME HON. MEMBERS: Hear, hear!
MR. SPEAKER: The hon. the Leader of the Opposition.
MS JONES: Mr. Speaker, I ask the minister: Isn’t it true that you told the people in Lewisporte at that time that there would not be a one-roof concept for lab and X-ray services, but you did not tell them you were prepared to gut their service within two weeks, did you?
MR. SPEAKER: The hon. the Minister of Health and Community Services.
SOME HON. MEMBERS: Hear, hear!
MR. ORAM: Mr. Speaker, I said exactly what I said, and that was that there would be no laboratory and X-ray services under the one roof in the new facility that we were building in Lewisporte. In terms of –
MS JONES: (Inaudible).
MR. ORAM: - if she would let me answer. In terms of a discussion around what was happening with closing out the lab and X-ray part of what we were doing in Lewisporte, that discussion was had but there was no final decision made on that when I was out in Lewisporte.
Either the Premier has his story shagged up or Oram does.
Which is it?
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From nottawa, one take on the curious case of a government building a new health centre while at the same time shifting health services out of the community.
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According to Premier Danny Williams, the Tory backbencher representing Lewisporte was told “some time ago” that health services in the town would be changed.
According to Here and Now - CBC television’s supper hour news show - the people responsible for delivering the health service (Central regional health authority) found out about the changes the morning they were announced publicly.
And they had no hand in deciding how to implement the changes.
Interesting.
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Tory backbencher Wade Verge is pissed because he wasn’t told health services in his district were on the chopping block.
The Premier is dismissing Verge’s claim with a snort and a sneer.
But Premier Danny Williams said Verge needs to check his facts since he was briefed "some time ago" by the premier's chief of staff.
"I think now his explanation to us this morning is that he didn't understand that that's what it meant. Pfff. Anyway, for what it's worth, he's entitled to his opinion. … Obviously he has to act on the behalf on what he thinks are the best interests of his district," he said.
The chief of staff would be Brian Crawley.
So, that means the Premier is trusting the recollections of a guy who told Madam Justice Cameron that he was beset by a form of C.R.A.F.T disease: he can’t recall a friggin’ thing.
Interesting.
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