VICTORIA – The B.C. government is in discussions to sell 400 hip and knee replacement surgeries to Saskatchewan over the next two years.

NDP health critic Adrian Dix revealed the plan in question period at the B.C. legislature Wednesday, and demanded to know why Health Minister Kevin Falcon was offering surgical services to another province as health regions around B.C. are cutting back elective surgeries to balance their budgets.

Falcon says the discussion is in its early stages, but he supports the idea because Saskatchewan will pay more for the service and that will help B.C. patients get their surgeries faster. He rejected as "nonsense" Dix's suggestion that B.C. patients are being displaced in the surgical waiting line by paying customers from Saskatchewan.

"This is an opportunity for us to charge a premium by doing Saskatchewan surgeries, if in fact we end up doing that, that go into making sure that they can get through the system quicker and faster by injecting the additional dollars into additional procedures here," Falcon said.

Dix said B.C.'s regional health authorities have canceled 10,000 elective surgeries this year to make their budgets balance, and there are already "tens of thousands" of people on waiting lists in B.C.

"The Interior Health Authority is canceling 428 orthopedic surgeries alone between now and the end of the fiscal year [March 31]," Dix said.

In question period, Falcon stressed that hip and knee replacements have roughly doubled since 2001, and the median wait time for a hip replacement has fallen from more than 18 weeks to 10 weeks. B.C. has pioneered a streamlined system for hip and knee operations that other provinces will pay a premium for because it's too expensive for them to duplicate at home, he said.

Since taking the health ministry job this spring, Falcon has been emphasizing that B.C. is increasing funding for health services by 20 per cent over the next three years, and that demand for services is growing so quickly that even that doesn't cover everything he would like to provide.

Dix argues that the budget increase is largely illusory.

Vancouver Coastal health authority's service plan shows a two per cent increase in funding this year, and the government has signed labour agreements that force them to increase pay by four to five per cent, so service cuts are no surprise, he said.

Dix argues that the philosophy behind this move is a further commercialization of health care.

"The order of surgery in our public hospitals should be based on medical need," Dix said. "That has always been the abiding principle in British Columbia, until perhaps the Falcon era."