Vanishing Doctors In America
And With Them, Vanishing Healthcare, Too
As the Trump-owned House of Representatives prepared to pass his “big, beautiful bill” several weeks ago that lets the rich grower richer through major tax cuts funded from areas of the social security net like Medicaid (healthcare for the poor and elderly in America, by the way), something else was happening that nobody in the Administration seemed to realize.
More and more American doctors were leaving the U.S. and moving to Canada to practice medicine. The exodus is continuing.
Why are American doctors flooding north of the border? Because, according to this story in KFF Health News, they care about what they do and they realize that the Trump administration doesn’t give a damn about healthcare.
Reversing The Brain Drain
The first step to being licenced in Canada is to apply through the Medical Council of Canada. The MCC reports that applications through its portal have soared 750% in just the past seven months alone.
What’s ironic is that back in the mid 1960s and through the early 1970s, as universal healthcare was fully established in Canada and doctors’ income levels fixed to patient fees set by provincial health boards, a large number of Canadian doctors headed south, heeding the siren call from American hospitals and clinics that dangled fat income figures.
Indeed, a Canadian doctor practicing in the U.S. can, to this day, make a small fortune every year.
This led some in Canada to complain that the exodus was leaving Canadians without enough family doctors, especially in rural communities in the country.
The Crippling Workload
But the cost is in many cases horrendous, according to American physicians and that’s another reason that many are opting out. The hours, the pressure, the endless paperwork demanded by the maze of health insurers in America, has become too much to bear. Throw in Donald Trump and many American docs are saying enough is enough and they’re heading north.
Another irony in this scenario is that our doctor shortages in Canada may lessen as a result. For example, I live in a small city northwest of Toronto called Guelph. It’s a well established, historical community of just over 100,000 people but you can’t find a family doctor to save your life (no pun intended). When I moved here four years ago from Niagara on the Lake (or, as I like to think of it, Paradise on the Lake), 20 minutes from the border with Buffalo, N.Y, I didn’t bother trying to find a family doc; I kept the one I had in Niagara on the Lake.
Dentists? They’re crawling out of the woodwork. But family doctors around here are like rare earth minerals.
So, Trump’s policies, steeped as much in vengeance as they are in stupidity, are creating serious issues within the medical profession and the ones who feel it, as always, are those who cannot afford expensive, blue chip health insurance coverage but who face the risk of bankruptcy should they end up in hospital for an operation or an emergency of some kind.
Here’s another story illustrating this point.
Impoverished And Disconnected
Doctor shortages are a huge problem in America, too, especially in rural and isolated areas of the country. And there are many of these often poor communities where there may be a hospital no closer than a hundred miles away if they’re lucky. A general lack of funding from federal and state levels over the years has led to more and more small, rural hospitals and clinics closing.
In an attempt to combine internet technology and medical services via telehealth for rural areas that lack connectivity alongside poor medical access, the Biden administration made available 42 billion dollars to wire these communities under the 2021 Infrastructure And Jobs Act.
That money was terminated by Laughing Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, because there were “better alternatives.” So the money began to flow to, guess who, Elon Musk’s Starlink company whose services are often far more expensive for end users than broadband.
Let’s Hear It For Socialist Medicine, Comrades!
Now, the poor, rural communities throughout the U.S., and more often than not in Red states, will continue to go without medical services, either in their physical communities or via the internet through Telehealth, because they won’t be able to afford the cost of Starlink.
Here in Canada, nearly 94% of the population has high speed internet coverage. No one is ever far from medical assistance and no one ever goes bankrupt because they had a heart attack, needed a hip replacement or an emergency heart procedure.
And this is what many Republicans call “socialist medicine.”
So, apart from the one hundred billion other reasons not to become the 51st state, why would we want American healthcare?