Quote:
Originally Posted by MonctonRad
The death knell for Canadian health care was the Barer-Stoddart Report implemented federally by the Liberal Chretien administration and all provincial governments in the mid 1990s.
It stated at the time that too many physicians were being produced by Canadian medical schools, and that physicians were not busy enough, and were resorting to ordering unnecessary tests and performing unnecessary procedures in order to bulk up their billings. They recommended an immediate reduction in medical school enrollment which the governments at the time instituted with great glee.
I was practicing at the time, and almost all physicians couldn't believe what they were hearing. Even back then, we knew that a great reckoning was going to happen in the 2020s with the aging of the boomer generation. It seemed to be tremendously bad policy on the part of the governments to cut medical school enrollment when this meant that physicians would be aging out at the same time as when their patients would be needing more and more intensive medical care. We protested loudly, but, the governments liked what they heard from the health care economists more.
The economists said that physicians were nothing more than cost centres. Physicians were expensive. They ordered expensive tests and performed expensive procedures. They also admitted patients to hospitals which was doubly expensive. The best way to limit health care costs was to limit the number of physicians. The government loved hearing this.
And here we are now,
This will not be a quick fix. It will take 20-25 years to get physician resources back to where they should be. Our expectations of government should be limited. There are no quick fixes.
It takes 13-15 years to mint a physician.
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Good summation. Several friends of mine who are physicians in SJ have made similar comments when the topic comes up. I think it started with McKenna and the restriction on billing numbers in 92 then went downhill from there.
I've heard several recruiting stories over the years about two physician couples where one was actively courted to come here but declined only because there was no billing number for the spouse.
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