My family doctor emigrated to the US from Canada years ago. He has just installed an EMR and qualified easily for meaningful use stimulus funds because he takes Medicaid patients. To qualify for meaningful use under Medicaid, all you have to do is order the EMR; it doesn’t even have to be up and running.
Medicare is more rigid; outcomes must be reported. To report on outcomes, he had to buy another module of the EMR, probably because the EMR he bought was developed before the meaningful use standard or the stimulus money. In his opinion, it will be difficult to report significant outcomes for Medicare and Medicaid patients, because they often don’t stay in his practice long enough. They move, they change insurance, they drop off Medicaid into the ranks of the uninsured. People in the US no longer stay with a medical practice long enough for longitudinal study — which is why all our EMRs have to talk to each other and we have to track patients as they move from provider to provider.
Today, as part of a wide-ranging discussion we had on the state of health care in America, he told me a little about his experience and that of his family in Canada. He says America does not look at Canadian health care from the right perspective. We think it’s great that Canadians have universal health care, but we don’t understand what that means.
When he practiced in Montreal (and today), primary care docs were capped at a certain number of billable dollars and patients a month. After he hit the cap, which he did very early in every month, he was only paid 25% of what he billed. His colleagues would limit the number of patients they saw a day to about 20, so they hit the cap at the end of the month. He liked to see 30-40 patients a day, so he would hit the cap way before the end of the month, and he wanted to continue to see patients because he enjoyed them. But he finally figured out that it cost him 35% of what he billed to run his practice, so it didn’t pay for him to see more patients. He left Canada.
In Canada, the untold story is that although they are insured, 300,000 people are without a primary care doctor — because no matter how many doctors there are, it won’t be enough if they limit the number of appointments the can grant a month.He told me that’s why people in Canada, including his own mother, have to wait two months for an appointment with a family doctor unless it’s a real emergency. I knew that was true of specialists, but I had never heard about primary care scarcity before. Canadians also pay out of pocket for things like camp physicals; there’s a chart of services and costs on the wall of the doctor’s office that tells patients what the government doesn’t pay for, and what the cost will be to them.
Dr. Kramer loves America because in his own practice he can now happily afford to see 30-40 patients a day, or not, depending on the need. And unlike many family doctors, he continues to see Medicaid patients, even though they pay less, because they are interesting cases. That energizes him; he has problems he can solve.
But he watches the younger docs go on salary and limit themselves to 20 patients a day at places like Mayo Clinic, and it worries him for the future of American health care. He admits that it’s a great improvement in the physician’s quality of life, but he predicts a huge upcoming shortage of doctors as American docs go on a system more similar to that of Canada, and begin limiting the number of patients they see daily because they are no longer incentivized to see more.
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I can tell you from personal experience, if American medicine became like Canadian medicine, it would suck. Depending upon what part of Canada you are in makes a serious difference. Some hospitals are joked that “it is where they go to die”…Red Deer, Alberta is one of them. The level of care a patient gets depends upon their age. If they are younger, there seems to be a no-holds barred expectation on what you can get for medical care, but if you are in your 60’s or the later years of your life, what should happen doesn’t in Canada. Limitations for what will be done to help heal seem implemented. My Mother in law laid in bed in dirty diapers for over 15 hours at a time, we ended up hiring her a private nurse, because the nurses on staff were too busy laughing and carrying on at the nurses station to come do their jobs. In addition, I was up there once to try and implement new MRI services into the area. The radiologists I had been involved with requested I speak with the Minister of Health for Alberta, because the province was allocated money for ultrasound exams, but not for MRI. One practice I knew of had 10 ultrasound machines, because the ministry of health had allocated money for ultrasound and not MRI. They have since advanced some, but from an outside observer, who is involved in health care in the USA, stay in the USA.