Quote:
Originally Posted by flamesfever
Simply raising wages is not getting to the heart of the problem.
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Wages are not the solution. In fact they're the problem.
Medicine in Canada suffers from the same affliction that housing, dairy, and telecommunications do: there are people who have benefit from supply scarcity, and those people have managed to make the people who control the system do their bidding (by various means).
In the case of scarce medicine, the beneficiaries are the staff, who enjoy high salaries as a result of Canada not having enough doctors. We have roughly half as many doctors per capita as the EU and 2/3rds of the OECD average (
source). We would be more efficient if we could increase the supply of staff and pay them less as a result.
That would suggest increasing med school places as a solution. However, there are a few problems. The first is keeping those doctors in Canada after we train them. The training would need to be tied to a significant contractual obligation. The second is harder to solve: the politicians that make the investment would be replaced by the time it pays off. It's just not a good policy on a four year timeline. We need to tell our potential leaders that we want to make the investment and will reward them for it even if won't pay off until the long term.