LAKELAND - When Gilles Boulianne, 71, started having hip and back pain a few years ago, he brought it up with his family doctor, who wrote him a prescription for Arthrotec, a medication used to treat osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.
“But nobody actually looked deep enough into it until he could hardly walk,” says his wife, Eileen Boulianne. Frustrated and still in pain, Gilles changed doctors during the summer of 2024 and was sent for a test of his sciatic nerve, then an X-ray.
“I got the results, [they said] ‘Your hips are bone on bone’,” says Gilles.
He was told it would be a two-year wait before he could have the hip surgery required, in Alberta.
According to Waiting Your Turn: 2024 Report by the Fraser Institute, which studies wait times for health services across Canada, doctors believe a reasonable wait time for a hip procedure after seeing a specialist is three to six months. The same report says the median wait time in Canada is 38.4 weeks or just shy of nine months.
In the meantime, Gilles’ doctor wrote him a prescription for Gabapentin.
“I said, well I don’t think I’ll survive two years. You know what happens with painkillers? The more you take it the more they don’t work. I was up to six a day, but I didn’t want to be hooked on that stuff,” says Gilles.
The doctor sent him for a cortisone shot, and the Bouliannes started looking at private healthcare options.
You can’t pay to skip the line here
According to the website for Surgical Solutions Network, which includes a chartered surgical facility (CSF) in Calgary, “you are required to travel out of province for procedures that are covered by provincial health insurance.”
“The funny part is, I'm pretty sure other people can come to our province to get the hip surgery done, but because of Alberta laws, they won't allow us to do it here, which is really stupid, because Calgary would have been a lot better choice for us,” says Eileen.
For the Bouliannes, the requirement to go out of province meant travelling to Toronto or Montreal and nearly doubled the cost of the private surgery.
“The whole bill was $44,000 when I totalled it up,” says Gilles, who farms west of St. Paul. He says the money came from his retirement savings and from the hay he sold before the surgery.
He opted to get the surgery done in Montreal where he had a cousin, and where the procedure was planned to be less invasive. The surgery itself was $27,000. The remainder of the bill was the cost of airfare, hotels, and meals for himself, his wife Eileen, and their daughter, who came to support her mother while Gilles was in surgery.
“There were four guys in there from Alberta at the same time,” says Gilles.
Draining staff from hospitals
Chartered Surgical Facilities were expanded in Alberta as part of the Alberta Surgical Initiative in 2019, with the goal of outsourcing 30 per cent of surgeries in the province, reducing overall wait times, and increasing the total number of surgeries completed.
According to a 2023 Parkland Institute report, “between 2018-2019 and 2021-2022, surgical volumes in chartered surgical facilities increased by 48 per cent while surgical activity in public hospitals declined by 12 per cent.”
During a press conference responding to allegations of government interference in contract negotiations on Feb. 19, Premier Danielle Smith said, “it doesn’t seem to matter how much additional dollars we give to AHS [Alberta Health Services], they’re not increasing the number of surgeries that they’re doing.”
The Parkland Institute report offers an explanation – “The private sector offers incentives such as reduced workloads, less complex patients, and higher pay to attract workers from the public system.”
“When you need it, it wasn’t there.”
Asked if the surgery was worth the money, both Gilles and Eileen say it absolutely was.
“I am so glad he's got it done. Honestly, I've been putting his socks on for two-and-a-half years because he couldn't bend over to put his socks on,” says Eileen.
“He wasn’t in a bad mood about it when he was in pain, so I can’t complain about that. But I’m happy to see that he might be able to golf again. He came to a standstill with all that kind of stuff. You like to see them enjoy themselves,” adds Eileen.
Now three weeks out from his surgery and walking more every day, Gilles says he’s proud he did it, but “I feel sorry for people who can’t afford this.”
Gilles is looking forward to being back in the tractor when it comes time to seed this spring.
“It’s ridiculous though. I paid my health care dues all this life and when you need it, it wasn’t there. It’s a shame that it comes to that."
