This is an old article but I thought I would post it since the Health and Fitness Territory is a going concern again.
Canada ranked last among wealthy nations in terms of access to primary care. Only 86% of Canadians have access to a primary care physician. I don't even believe this number. Technically, my family has a primary care physician but she is two hours away in Toronto where we haven't lived for over 3 years now. Not the most ideal situation.
Not to mention if you need a specialist, good luck.
Canada keeps throwing money at the problem but it just keeps getting worse. Besides the obvious rationale that governments aren't good at allocating capital or operating large social programs efficiently, I think there are a few other factors causing this.
Aging population: 50 years ago there were 7.6 times as many working age people as there were senior citizens. Now 3.2. Seniors need much more health care than younger people. This is putting immense pressure on the demand side of the healthcare system.
Immigration: I am not here to make an argument for or against immigration but Canada has increased their intake of immigrants dramatically over the last decade and especially over the last 5 years. For decades, with some variance, Canada was letting in around 0.7% of the population in the form of new immigrants each year. That has been steadily increasing over the past decade and reached 1.2% in 2023. This has added more demand to the system and also some supply of workers but the lead time for supply of health care infrastructure, and educating, training, reskilling workers is much longer than the lead time of someone coming to Canada, obtaining permanent residence and utilizing the healthcare system.
Canada Producing fewer Doctors: Being a doctor is a thankless job in Canada. Canada is only graduating 7.5 new doctors per year per 100,000 people. The OECD average is 14.2. So we are producing new doctors at a much lower rate than other developed nations. On top of that, Canada is doing a very poor job in terms of licensing physicians who were educated abroad (whether they are Canadian citizens or not).
Taxation change: Doctors previously used to be able to save on income taxes by using corporations and holding companies to filter their income through. Around 7 or 8 years ago the government changed the taxation rules for doctors, making their incomes subject to employment income tax rates rather than professional corporation tax rates. There are still some benefits if they have their own practices but the tax rules are much more complex for and less friendly to doctors than they used to be. This caused many older doctors to retire or reduce their working hours and many younger doctors seem to also be choosing more work, life balance and working less days and hours each week.
Classic case of overwhelming demand but not enough ability to create new supply or even the correct incentive structure for existing supply to expand capacity.,
Let's make Canada Healthy Again so we don't need to use the broken system.
Sats for all,
GR