We’re paying the price for medical cost-cutting

Re: “All those obstacles are hurting our health care,” editorial, June 2.

The issue with medical school training spaces was the fact those spaces were being taken up with foreign graduates that paid dearly for the opportunity whereas Canadian graduates actually had to be paid while training. Governments financially benefited from allocating those spaces to foreign graduates.

The issue with family physicians was slightly more complex. Through the 1970s and 1980s, settlements negotiated with governments rarely kept up with inflation so overheads increased and take home pay decreased.

The result was family doctors started seeing more patients per hour, not taking on patients with complex care needs, and the introduction of walk-in clinics and hospitalists.

There was no need for “turf protection” since many doctors were closing their practices (not taking new patients), and the HMOs in the U.S.A. were recruiting Canadian family physicians at an alarming rate.

In spite of the above, the cost of health care continued to take a larger and larger share of the government’s budget.

Waiting lists were not a political problem so it was then determined that the way to curtail rising health-care costs was to decrease the number of practicing physicians and acute care hospital beds.

After all, it was family physicians that were ordering costly investigations, referring to specialists and putting patients in hospital beds.

Money could be saved by not increasing spaces in medical schools, decreasing hospital beds and not being concerned about the drain of doctors and nurses to the United States.

Governments are grappling with the short-term and short-sighted approaches in the past to cost-control in our healthcare system: Long waiting lists, scarce healthcare professionals, stacked up emergency departments and, if you don’t like it, you can be offered MAID.

Dr. Al Wilke retired family doctor Salt Spring Island