Canadian Medical Association champions private medicine.

摘要

Practice Solutions, a subsidiary of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) that helps doctors maximise their incomes, has three simple words of advice for doctors who bill on a fee-for-service basis: "Monitor your throughput." For salaried physicians, Practice Solutions has even blunter advice: "Until the supply of physicians catches up with patient demand, you will be plagued with waiting lists of patients wanting to see you."Because time is money, Practice Solutions tells doctors, "the goal is to find a volume of patients that allows you to provide a desired quality of care and still earn a decent living."But striking that balance-between making a comfortable living while ensuring patients get enough attention-is getting to be impossible within Canada's not-for-profit public health sector, according to Practice Solutions and the CMA. With 875 000 Canadians-about 2-5% of the national population-on waiting lists for treatment, the CMA increasingly promotes profit-driven alternatives within Canada's once-cherished not-for-profit public health system.In recent years, private treatment options geared toward wealthy patients willing to pay to bypass the public system have expanded rapidly, even as government efforts to reduce wait times show results. "Although it's still mostly talk, more and more doctors are interested in opting out of the public system and going private", says Tim Smith, one of a number of Practice Solutions executives with experience setting-up private clinics.