How about those Canadian Doctors :)
It is logical for Canadian doctors who need no additional qualifications to work in the US to go south for another reason. It pays better; much better! Canadian physician incomes averaged about C$135,000, and even surgical specialists get only about C$180,000. In the US specialists in groups averaged somewhere between $150,000 and $350,000, primary care around $150,000--and don't forget that Canadian dollars are worth 1/3 less than their American namesakes! In fact this chart of international physician incomes shows that virtually any doctor would be better off moving to the US. (Actually FYI Japanese doctors make more than Americans). So when Medpundit says that Canadian doctors are coming here in droves, you can't exactly blame them. Only one little thing is a bit strange; they are not!
The brave folks from UBC led again by my old colleagues Morris Barer and Bob Evans, as reported in this issue brief called The myth of Canadian physician emigration, show that although roughly 500 doctors a year are leaving to the US, somewhere between 250 and 300 were coming back the other way, and that the deficit was more than made up of other doctors immigrating to Canada--mostly Brits who thought that Canadian pay scales were pretty good compared to what they got at home! Even at its greatest extent Canada was losing 1.4% gross of its physicians and more than making it up through returning Canadians and importing foreigners. And even though Canada has fewer docs per head than the US (2.1 per 1,000 v 2.6) it has more than the UK or Japan (1.7 & 1.6) so these numbers are not significant either as a share of all doctors or proportionally to the population. It is worth pointing out that the other 99% of Canadian doctors didn't believe that doubling their salary was enough to compensate for the associated unpleasantness of having to move to the US! |
