Poor old pocotraitor doesn't realize when you get something for "free" you get what you paid for.
BEXTE: Alberta to let Canadians pay for an MRI before they're terminally ill"For years, Canadians have lived under a healthcare system where access to modern medicine is treated like a scarce commodity."
Keean Bexte
October 22, 2025
The following article is the opinion of Keean Bexte, Co-Founder of Juno News
For years, Canadians have lived under a healthcare system where access to modern medicine is treated like a scarce commodity. If you don’t have symptoms, you don’t get tests. If your odds of being sick are low, you wait until you’re visibly ill, until you’re coughing up blood, or slurring your words from a stroke, before the system will “allow” you to find out what’s wrong.
Doctors will tell you it’s not their fault. They operate under a system that forces them to weigh your right to first-world care against the limits of the public purse. They know ordering a precautionary MRI or CT scan for peace of mind is career suicide inside Alberta Health Services’ bureaucracy. So they don’t. They tell you to wait, to monitor, to come back if things get worse.
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Premier Danielle Smith and Health Minister Adriana LaGrange are done with that. They are giving every Canadian access to first-world medicine, whether a bureaucrat wants them to have it or not.
This week, the Alberta government announced plans to introduce “legislative reforms that will permit Albertans to privately purchase any private diagnostic screening and testing service that they wish.” That includes “MRIs, CT scans, full body scans, blood work, you name it.”
LaGrange put it plainly: “If there is a preventative test you wish to purchase, you will be entirely free to do so in Alberta.”
That single sentence marks one of the most significant healthcare reforms in Canadian history, not because it privatizes care (it doesn’t), but because it ends the quiet cruelty of bureaucratic permission-seeking. For the first time, Albertans will be trusted to make decisions about their own health without begging for approval.
Not only will this improve Albertans’ long-term health outcomes, it will create new jobs, attract investment, and make Alberta a destination for anyone who wants to put their health ahead of a government budget line item.
Smith underscored that Alberta’s public health guarantee remains intact. “When your family doctor asks you to get any kind of medical test, that test will continue to be covered by your Alberta healthcare insurance plan.” But she went further, announcing that the province will reimburse anyone who pays for a private test that uncovers a previously unknown life-threatening condition.
That is revolutionary. It means the government is financially incentivizing early detection, a policy rooted not in ideology, but in common sense. As LaGrange said, “It is far less costly and less invasive to treat these conditions in their early stages as opposed to when they have reached an advanced stage.”
And for taxpayers, it’s a bargain. Instead of pouring billions into new government infrastructure, private investors will build the next generation of diagnostic facilities themselves. The minister did not mince words: “This allows the private sector to acquire and build the billions of dollars worth of diagnostic equipment and infrastructure right here in Alberta for both public and private use, with no extra tax dollars being spent.”
That is how you build capacity. You invite investment instead of rationing it.
For decades, Canadian healthcare has operated like a planned economy, a single state-run buyer deciding who gets what, when, and how much. It is why someone in Toronto or Vancouver can wait 18 months for a simple MRI while the government insists the system is “universal.” In reality, it is universal misery.
Smith’s reform blows that model wide open. Alberta is now on track to become a national destination for modern healthcare, a place where innovation, private capital, and human dignity are prioritized. When someone in Ontario is told to “wait and see,” they will look westward, to a province where you don’t need to ask permission to care about your own health.
Of course, the unions and their political allies will launch an information war to convince Albertans that this new freedom is dangerous. They will claim it undermines the system, or that it will hurt the poor. In truth, they just want to keep you waiting in line, dependent on them, and powerless to make your own choices. Every new private clinic and every new MRI machine is one more reason the unions lose control of the narrative.
Predictably, critics will cry “two-tier healthcare.” But they miss the point entirely. Alberta’s public system is not shrinking. It is about to get stronger. Every dollar of private investment that buys a new MRI machine, every clinic built without taxpayer subsidy, frees up space for public patients.
The moral argument here is simple. Preventing illness is better than treating it late. The moral failing of Canada’s current system is that it denies people the chance to act before disaster strikes.
As Smith said in her announcement, “Empowering Albertans to extend and improve our personal health and the health of our loved ones should be everybody’s goal.”
That is the heart of it. For the first time, Albertans are being trusted to take control of their own well-being, not as patients waiting for permission, but as partners in prevention.
Finally in Alberta, you won’t have to wait until you’re coughing up blood to get an MRI. |
