It seems that our neighbors north of the border are also having a little crisis in healthcare. Canada’s healthcare system is remarkably different from ours, but it seems that they are plagued with the same problems when it comes to staffing shortages. And according to this article from the National Post, it seems that they are taking the same dumb-assed approach to solving a physician shortage (which was artificially created in the first place) that we are taking to solve the nursing shortage here (also artificially created).

The country [Canada] has approximately 15,000 too few doctors, a figure roughly double the total number of students in all years of study at our 17 medical schools combined. At a doctor-patient ratio of just 2.3 per 1,000 population, we are 24th on the list of 28 industrialized countries. Approximately 1.5 million Canadians cannot find a family physician as a result.

No, it isn’t the climate that is causing the shortage in Canada. The problem is multifaceted and complex, just like the nursing shortage here. It was created artificially, and the brilliant idea to solve it is to shorten medical training.

Yep, you heard right. Shave off a year of medical school, from 4 years to 3. And voila, all the issues that caused the shortage in the first place will disappear. Surely, whoever dreamed up this idiocy must have been receiving intel from the same idiot who decided that shortening nursing education in the US was the key to solving the shortage. Some brilliant minds at work no doubt. Just mass produce them puppies, and all troubles will melt like lemon drops.

The writer of this editorial agrees with me, and thinks that the idea is insane. Just like putting a bandaid on a head injury where your brains are oozing out of the skull.

If this scarcity can be alleviated, even in part, by shortening the duration of doctor training, it might be worth a look, provided Canadians can also be reassured the change will not dull the skill of the country’s new doctors. However, it doesn’t go to the twin hearts of the problem: socialized medicine and centralized planning of health care. Graduating more doctors sooner won’t cure the underlying condition. Rather, it is more like treating a wound on the left hand by suturing the right one.

The doctor shortage began in the mid-1980s — not coincidentally, at the same time the last Trudeau government passed the Canada Health Act, which forbade user fees, balanced billing by doctors and private clinics and hospitals. Immediately, doctors began moving to the United States by the hundreds every year. The effects of this exodus were compounded in the early 1990s when provincial health ministers consciously decided to limit enrolments in their medical schools. Doctors, they reasoned, were the enemies of health budgets; limit the number of doctors and there would be fewer tests ordered, fewer hospital beds filled, fewer surgeries performed and lower costs to their department’s budget. (By this thinking, eliminating doctors altogether would really bring provincial cost into line.)

And here I thought that the Canadians had more sense when it came to healthcare. Guess I was wrong.