‘Pottery Barn Rule’ applies to health care system, too

The Pottery Barn Rule: “You break it. You own it.”

This column appeared in yesterday’s edition of the Saint City News.

Students of recent American history will remember the story of how Gen. Colin Powell invoked “the Pottery Barn Rule” to warn President George Bush about the dangers of invading Iraq. “You break it, you own it.”

Never mind that Powell denies the quote or that Pottery Barn denies having such a rule: Bush ignored the wise counsel it sums up and he’ll forever be held responsible for the debacle that followed.

Well, I’ve got news for you. The Pottery Barn Rule doesn’t just apply to countries you plan to invade. It also belongs to broken health care systems – especially if you drummed up a needless public health crisis so you could step in and play the hero, and then botched the rescue.

So no matter what excuses they make, what denials they issue or whom they try to blame, Premier Ed Stelmach and Health Minister Ron Liepert own the current H1N1 influenza vaccination fiasco.

First they “fixed” our health care system by replacing nine regional health authorities that worked reasonably well with a massive, centralized, unresponsive and dysfunctional bureaucracy led by an outsider with no commitment to Alberta. Everyone in this province suspects the real reason for this was political, not practical.

If nothing else, the leaders of the nine health regions knew their own communities, and would have bucked changes on the Conservatives’ agenda that could have harmed public health care in their regions. So out they went!

In the midst of this massive, ill-considered and politically motivated restructuring of health care, Mr. Stelmach and his crew encouraged a large percentage of the public to become hysterical about the presumed dangers of the H1N1 influenza virus.

This is not to say H1N1 does not present a serious threat to many people, although whether the danger is greater than that of any other strain of influenza is a topic of legitimate debate. At least some experts argue the death rate from pandemic H1N1 flu is similar to that of the normal seasonal flu we face each winter.

But it’s hard to imagine Mr. Stelmach and Mr. Liepert didn’t raise the alarm without a reasonable degree of confidence they could solve the crisis in a few days of mass immunization clinics, impressing the heck out of everyone. So we were warned, repeatedly, about the dangers of H1N1 and the need to be vaccinated – and most of us took those warnings to heart.

Then Mr. Stelmach and Mr. Liepert flubbed the rescue. Their immunization program has been a gong show.

When we turned out in the thousands to answer their call to be immunized, their new improved health system could deliver only chaos. People waited hours to be sent home unvaccinated. Vaccine ran out. After being told to wait in line, we were advised to “wait our turn” while pregnant women, the elderly and other vulnerable citizens were immunized from the dwindling vaccine supply. Then we were told there would be no more clinics until … whenever.

So, if the government has known for months that pandemic influenza was coming Alberta’s way this fall, how could our massive health bureaucracy have failed to have enough vaccine on hand? Since supplies were limited, why weren’t clinics held first for the most vulnerable? How could the government so miscalculate the level of concern they’d been doing their best to ratchet up only days before?

It makes one wonder – if this government can’t manage a mass immunization program of an essentially healthy population, what would happen if we faced a genuine public health emergency in Alberta?

Alberta’s H1N1 crisis makes one thing pretty clear. Stelmach and his government can’t be trusted to run our health care system.

They broke it. They own it.