The medical doctor, or physician, is a well-respected occupation, so most of us don’t feel it’s too much of an inequality if doctors are paid a little more than the rest of us. They save lives, we think. They have stressful jobs, train for years—they deserve it. While that’s a reasonable position to hold, one can still ask: are doctors being
overpaid? Are they putting in less work hours, seeing less patients, with no change in their salaries? Has their well-respected position in society made them entitled and greedy? Or do they have a case?
Many media explore this controversial subject. The Globe and Mail suggests that the main reason Ontario doctors’ salaries have risen is because of the increasing cost of technological services that the healthcare system provides (e.g.: MRIs), while the actual amount of services per person remains the same. Some physician organizations (e.g.: CPSO) claim that the government is underfunding the system, so doctors need to
charge more as a result
[1].
The average Canadian doctor earns $387,000 annually—Ontario and Alberta have the
highest physician incomes in the country, with Ontario at $470,000
[2], and that’s not even delving into the inequalities within medical specialities
[3]. Doctors’ salaries make up about 25% of health spending and 10% of the provincial budget
[4].
Physicians are still engaged in a wage dispute with the province. More cuts had been made last September 2015, in the form of the OMA’s (Ontario Medical Association) rejection of a three-year deal that offered to increase the funds available to doctors’ salaries, saying there wasn’t enough money
[5].
How are
doctors reacting? Many are taking to social media and writing open letters to express their anger. The hash tags
#CareNotCuts,
#oncall4ON and
#CodeBlue were supposed to emphasize that cuts in physician fees will harm patient care, and aimed to show that doctors are dedicated and hard-working. However, since these focus on too much on gross billings (cost of service with no reduction), which are enormous compared to other industries’, these doctors come off as whiny and insincere
[6].
Some doctors are threatening another “
brain drain”—a period in the 1990’s when many of Canada’s doctors left for the U.S. because of fee battles—and that it will affect the quality of healthcare for patients. Other governmental health officials claim these threats are baseless, calling it fear mongering, saying that even with fee cuts, doctors will remain the
highest paid workers [7].
But with the high esteem we regard doctors with, it’s easy to forget that they are people, too, with other interests besides buying expensive Lamborghinis. With the most recent round of cuts, nuclear medicine specialists, for example, will see their salaries drop by 17%, which could endanger their upkeep of private practices, causing them to lay off staff
[8]. In some cases, some doctors who have been training for over a decade, and accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, find it unfair to have only recently gotten a staff position and faced with cut pay
[9].
So, what can be done about this? Either the province needs to
restrict growth in the amount of services provided, which potentially harms patients, or take a direct approach with fees, which potentially harms healthcare professionals
[10]. No matter what you think of doctors, it’s undeniable that there will be consequences if this dispute persists.
