Missing facts create misleading perspective

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/01/2024 (608 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This is what happens when you only use half the facts and ignore important perspectives. You end up with half a story, and a misleading one at that.

An FP news report published yesterday in this newspaper and the Winnipeg Free Press revealed that “fewer than 800 Manitobans underwent out-of-province medical procedures at a cost of nearly $37 million before the surgical backlog task force was disbanded late last year.”

The report quoted a patient named Judy Waytiuk, who had two hip replacements done through the program, as saying that the money paid by the province was “both obscene and shameful.” Though she also described the cost as “lunacy,” she also said that “I’m still very glad I got to go out of province, I won’t lie … But the cost — that’s outrageous.”

Waytiuk’s outrage apparently has limits, however. The report revealed that she recently submitted a $1,100 claim to the provincial government for reimbursement of expenses incurred when she travelled to Fargo, N.D., for her second hip replacement last month.

The report also quoted Molly McCracken, director of the Manitoba office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, an NDP-friendly think tank, complaining that “Public dollars were used for private surgeries with no information on the value for money of this service. This lack of transparency in the public health system is unacceptable.”

Finally, the report quoted Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara as arguing that the task force’s approach of sending patients out of Manitoba, instead of investing that money in the provincial health-care system, hampered efforts to build surgical capacity here at home.

“We missed an opportunity for years to ensure that we are working with front-line health-care workers, surgeons, health leaders in Manitoba that meet the needs of Manitobans, and we’ve taken immediate steps to change that culture,” Asagwara says.

The minister added that “we are ultimately seeing the impacts of some of that decision-making … Had they taken a different approach, we would have more capacity right now in Manitoba for the Manitobans who need it.”

What a bunch of one-sided, revisionist-history spin and jibberish.

The report fails to indicate how much longer those 800 Manitobans would have been forced to suffer in pain if they have not been given the option of out-of-province surgery. That would have been a relevant fact for readers to know.

The report creates the impression that the out-of-province procedures were more expensive than they would have cost if performed here in Manitoba, yet doesn’t tell readers what the total cost of those procedures would have been if they had been done here.

In the absence of an actual cost comparison, readers were implicitly invited to make an assumption that may not be correct. Your calculator will tell you that $37 million divided by 800 equals $46,250. That doesn’t sound like an outrageous cost for complicated surgical procedures such as knee and hip replacements.

Even worse still, the report implies that Manitoba hospitals had the capacity to perform those surgeries at the time, when the facts pointed to the opposite conclusion. Conspicuously absent from the report is any reminder that, as the COVID-19 pandemic ended, Manitoba was experiencing record-long wait times for surgical and diagnostic procedures.

Thousands of Manitobans were living in constant pain, while thousands more were waiting for diagnostic tests to be performed. There weren’t enough doctors, nurses and technicians in the province to quickly reduce the numbers of those who were waiting.

In response to the crisis, the Stefanson government created the diagnostic and surgical and recovery task force in December 2021, giving it the mandate to eliminate the backlogs caused by the pandemic.

More than 72,000 procedures were funded by the task force over the next two years, including the 800 out-of-province surgeries that were performed on Manitobans who were willing and able to travel to other provinces or the U.S. for those procedures — people like Ms. Waytiuk.

Last May, the task force estimated that an additional 180,000 procedures would be completed through the program by early 2025. With the task force now disbanded by Asagwara, however, it is unclear if so many procedures will be completed in that time frame.

If not, it means that many Manitobans will be forced to suffer in pain even longer, and they will have the Kinew government to blame.

Asagwara claims that Manitoba would have “more capacity right now” if the 800 out-of-province procedures had been performed here in Manitoba, but that’s nonsense. It would have simply made wait times even longer.

Premier Wab Kinew has repeatedly said that it will take years to hire the hundreds of doctors and nurses needed to increase capacity and reduce backlogs.

When Manitoba Tories complain that the deck is stacked against them when it comes to media coverage, this is an example of what they are talking about. Yesterday’s report was missing a lot of relevant information that, if included, may have pointed to a different, more informed and accurate perspective.