Health Care

[st27]

Continuing a thread within a thread from the retired guy post....For those that live in Ontario, we are about to experience another example of Liberal incompetence. After setting up the wasteful LHINs [the administration alone costs $103 million/yr], they have a running battle with doctors.   

Many family doctors and specialists now fight to keep their practices afloat. Even though physician offices run like small businesses, doctors prioritize patient care over profit. So when funding cuts escalated in 2015, many doctors had to reduce staff, reduce services or, in worst-case scenarios, close their clinics altogether.

Long considered a resource-rich city, Toronto is no longer immune to the impact of reckless Liberal decisions. The steep price of the government’s actions in the past six months alone has included a family doctor, an ophthalmologist, an orthopedic surgeon, an INR clinic, and two addiction clinics, affecting over 60,000 patients.

In addition, emergency departments, inpatient wards and operating rooms are bursting at the seams, unable to keep pace with growing need and shrinking resources. 

http://www.torontosun.com/2016/04/17/toronto-needs-to-speak-up-about-liberals-health-cuts      This is an open letter written by a Georgetown physician. 

 

Its incredible how the province has no trouble building jobs for beauracrats and creating red tape.

 And with the feds hitting the high earners with an additional 4% on income tax, what are the incentives for these professionals to work their asses off and stay in Ontario?  If you are having trouble finding a physician or getting treatment now, wait a year or two.

[DEFCON]

There are almost too many problems with the system to count. Collapse is probably the only form of calamity that'll ever produce the kind of leverage necessary to achieving any form of fix for the system.

Technological advancements and all the other costs related to the delivery of health care services go up continuously while efficiencies and other issues the private sector must manage go largely ignored, not just in the health care sector, but in any area the government operates.

Physicians made a deal with the devil when they signed up for the government billing / payment program way back when and now lament their short sighted approach, it all seemed so simple back then I guess?

If we were to consider all the ongoing short-comings inherent in the health care industry, is it not fair to ask our leaders exactly what they hope to achieve by pursuing Party enhancing strategies that continue to add hundreds of thousands of people a year to the medical lists that have not, nor are ever likely to contribute a single dime to the maintenance of the system? What should we, the ones that have and continue to pay the nut, expect from a standards of care perspective as all the manifest inefficiencies, complexities and natural cost increases come to conspire against us in the present time?

And who is ensuring the standard of care physicians are providing now is even up to snuff? Earning the title of Doctor of Medicine alone doesn't mean that all are equally qualified. In fact, all graduates receive a licence to practice and are never really looked at again, which leaves the patient unaware of whether he's drawn the guy that graduated with 99%, or the one that scored 51%.

Until there's a way found through which the public can reliably measure a physicians knowledge and performance and choose, Canadian physicians will all go on receiving the same pay and benefits regardless of the product they produce. The system as designed currently protects physicians from professional scrutiny, the sort that an ATP would receive over the course of his career, which chills any notion of professional development and leaves the system staffed by people of questionable skills etc. and the patient population open to routine mistakes that are akin to landing with the gear up.

Back in the early nineties there were quite a number of newly graduating and experienced physicians of all specialties abandoning Canada specifically because of its archaic medical system and moving their operations to the US where they expected to make their fortunes. During the early years of the 21st Century a physician friend advised that many expats had begun to return and take up their practices here once again. I asked if increases in malpractice fees might be driving the return and he acknowledged that as a strong possibility. So, the US got to give our physicians a tryout, pick the good ones and then effectively send the 51%ers back to Canada.

So how should we go about measuring the individual and collective value of physicians to our society and get the kind of care we've come to expect during periods of deepening austerity?