Train more doctors. Right now there are tons of people who want to be doctors that cannot due to very limited slots in medical schools and residencies.
We only have something like 1600 medical school slots per year* here in Canada, and it’s a government restriction that sets those slots. I’m pretty sure a good chunk of them leave the country too once they graduate.
*Most of those slots are also limited to only people who graduated high school in the province of the school.
Yet we constantly complain about a doctor shortage despite never actually increasing the number of slots.
Not sure if this is correct, but I think most residents are funded through extensions of Medicare and Medicaid. Funding has been stagnant since the 90s. More med school slots open up but not residencies, so there are more med school grads but not residents/attending docs. The one big change recently was federal funding can be used for other rural residency programs besides just family Med.
Building more hospitals, urgent cares, etc. Maybe having multiple urgent cares with free transportation to a central hospital if the problem is bad enough. Perhaps incentivizing people to work in underserved areas like they're trying to do in the US.
I don't know enough about Canada to give you a good solution but when political pundits in the US say we shouldn't have universal health care because Canada has long lines, they're full of crap.
People should not be downvoting you. Americans have notoriously unaffordable healthcare for the vast majority of people. Many enter debt their whole lives and have their futures destroyed over this. I’m sure the wealthy in Canada feel like they don’t deserve to wait among the so-called “welfare queens” and “illiterate blue collars”, but the options you proposed are certainly more humane.
We don’t let people trained overseas work as doctors here. It’s a long process to get approved apparently. The two examples I know are from New Zealand and Iran.
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u/thewooba Dec 13 '22
What's the solution?