Date: 2010
Location: Edmonton
Profile: Dr. Hubert Kammerer is a physician specializing in geriatric psychiatry at the Glenrose Hospital. Earlier, he was a physician at the community-run Boyle McCauley Health Centre. A strong supporter of universal, public healthcare, he responded to the efforts of Ralph Klein to drastically cut healthcare funding, privatize healthcare delivery, and create two-tier medicine by joining with UNA president Heather Smith and a few others to revitalize Friends of Medicare (FOM) in early 1995. An immediate concern was Klein’s effort to privatize cataract surgery in Edmonton despite the Royal Alex providing an excellent, efficient service.
Kammerer sought to inform Albertans about ways in which cuts were harming them. He wanted Albertans to know that two-tier systems elsewhere promoted deeper cuts in government grants that produced an inability of the public system to provide timely service. So, those who could afford paid, private services bought them, while low-income people received poor service. Kammerer advocates expanding the number of community-run clinics, ending the fee-for-service model which focuses on assembly-line medicine and seeing sick people as opposed to keeping people healthy, expanding medicare to include pharmacare, and having federal control over healthcare.
Dr. Kammerer was interviewed together with fellow FOM activist Jason Foster.
Keywords: Boyle-McCauley Health Centre; Cataract surgery; Friends of Medicare revival, 1995; Geriatric psychiatry; Pharmacare; Physician; Privatization; Ralph Klein; Royal Alex; Two-tier medicine.
See also: Friends of Medicare