Originally posted by Christoph

No offense, but I think you guys are running out of doctors because of the socialization of your medical system, not because of an increase in demand. Plain and simple, no one wants to go through the intense hassle of becoming a doctor if there isn't enough economic payoff. Left alone, the medical system would automatically produce enough doctors to fill the increasing demand; because as the demand increases, prices/wages would increase. More prospective doctors would be lured in to claim the increased payoff, and things would come back to equilibrium.

But in a socialized system, there's no increase in wages/prices to match the increasing demand of the higher proportion of old folks. It's the effective equivalent of a price cap. And as we all know, price caps create shortages.

You're absolutely right Chris, our doctors are running to the States because they can make much more money there. It's the called the brain drain, and it's a word that is well known to all Canadians, as a similar situation exists for a lot of our top fields. Simply put, the brains go to where the money is. Which is understandable to some degree: is someone going to stay around getting paid maybe half as much as they would somewhere else, just because of a sense of nationalism? Some reason why our rural areas are seriously lacking doctors: they go to the big cities. So the government places price caps on these doctors for a few years in hopes of inticing docs to move to more rural areas.

If you lived in Canada or viewed our media, you'd hear one particular term quite often when hearing talks about healthcare: two-tier (or, as some call, "American-ized" health care), and a lot of Canadians shiver when they hear it. Because the basic fear (largely promoted by our left-of-center party the NDP) is that by allowing private hospitals, you will develop two systems of healthcare: the private one where all the best doctors and equipment go (because that's where the money is) and the lesser public one. That's essentially the fear. Just a little insight into the socialization of our healthcare system.