If Ontario is to see a decrease in its $16-billion deficit throughout the next few years, Premier Dalton McGuinty believes it is necessary to make cuts from health-care costs (1). These cuts are specifically aimed at the fees doctors are eligible to charge for their medical services, leading to an overall (but ostensibly “slight”) reduction in their income.
The province plans to make a total of $338-million in health-care cuts, in which the money is “likely to be reinvested in primary care” over the next few years (1). Regarding a few specialties, it has been said that large cuts have been made to their service fees, whereas smaller cuts were made to the rest.
We can look at a couple of factors that will inevitably play out soon after these economic decisions commence: firstly, as the Canadian Medical Association had pointed out, doctors will likely move to jurisdictions where their services are worth more (or are on the rise) rather than stay in the province where they are declining, even slightly (1). Such doctors may turn out to be on the younger end of the spectrum, where they enter a profession with enormous debts inherited from medical school fees.
Secondly, with a decrease in their income, doctors may be driven to see more patients to reconcile for their losses, pushing forth a heavier workload on a professional whom initially works hard.
The fact that the potential $338-million made from health-care cuts is said to likely be reinvested into primary care sounds uncertain. If this reinvestment does not occur in primary care, then we are simply diminishing our health-care system.
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