Tag Archive: Doctor Shortages


Tens Of Thousands Of Canadians Flee Canada

 

 

” Canada is amongst the top countries in the world when it comes to safety and security. So what could be so bad that it enticed tens of thousands of Canucks to flee the country in 2013?

  How about socialized healthcare?

  To deal with these shortages and long lines, nearly 42,000 Canadians opted to pay for their own operations by fleeing the country to seek services elsewhere. Waiting times for patients who had consulted with specialists increased to 9.6 weeks in 2013, up from 9.3 weeks the previous year. As the Fraser Institute recently reported , sick Canadians have fled the country to avoid “the consequences of waiting for care such as worsening of their condition, poorer outcomes following treatment, disability or death. And some may have done so simply to avoid delay and to make a quicker return to their life.” “

 

 

Coming soon to a Doctor near you , but where do Americans flee to ? Read more at MisesEconomicsBlog

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Happy Yet?

 

 

 

” Three years after the disastrous launch of the Affordable Care Act, most of the website troubles finally have been ironed out. People are now able to log on to the government’s ACA website and to most of the state health-insurance exchanges. The public has grudgingly come to accept higher insurance premiums, new taxes and increases in part-time workers who were formerly full-time. But Americans are irate anyway—because now they’re seeing the health-care law’s destructive effect on the fundamental nature of the way their care is delivered.

Even before the ACA’s launch in 2013, many physicians—seeing the changes in their profession that lay ahead—had begun talking their children out of going to medical school. After the launch, compensation fell, while nothing in the ACA stopped lawsuits and malpractice premiums from rising. Doctors must now see many more patients each day to meet expenses, all while dealing with the mountains of paperwork mandated by the health-care law.

The forecast shortage of doctors has become a real problem. It started in 2014 when the ACA cut $716 billion from Medicare to accommodate 30 million newly “insured” people through an expansion of Medicaid. More important, the predicted shortage of 42,000 primary-care physicians and that of specialists (such as heart surgeons) was vastly underestimated. It didn’t take into account the ACA’s effect on doctors retiring early, refusing new patients or going into concierge medicine. These estimates also ignored the millions of immigrants who would be seeking a physician after having been granted legal status.”

 

 

 

Illustration by Dave Granlund

 

 

 

 

 

As Health Care Gets More Bureaucratic, Will Doctors Go Galt?

 

 

” I am a general surgeon with more than three decades in private clinical practice. And I am fed up. Since the late 1970s, I have witnessed remarkable technological revolutions in medicine, from CT scans to robot-assisted surgery. But I have also watched as medicine slowly evolved into the domain of technicians, bookkeepers, and clerks. 

Government interventions over the past four decades have yielded a cascade of perverse incentives, bureaucratic diktats, and economic pressures that together are forcing doctors to sacrifice their independent professional medical judgment, and their integrity. The consequence is clear: Many doctors from my generation are exiting the field. Others are seeing their private practices threatened with bankruptcy, or are giving up their autonomy for the life of a shift-working hospital employee. Governments and hospital administrators hold all the power, while doctors—and worse still, patients—hold none.”