This one I find hilarious and gives me great deal of personal satisfaction. The pro-American health care system, "it’s the finest on earth crowd" goes on and on about how terrible the Canadian system is and how all the doctors are leaving. In fact it was that sentiment especially from the wonderful, but confused, Sydney Smith over at Medpundit that inspired my "Oh Canada" tome.  (Actually I re-read "Oh Canada" the other day and it’s a pretty damn good piece of analysis if I say so myself).

Syd was basically saying that all the doctors were leaving cos they hated the clinical restrictions of the single payer system and wanted to move to the glorious homeland of free-choice medical practice and CABGs for 97 year olds. I showed pretty conclusively using actual real life data that a) very few doctors were leaving Canada for the US, and that b) if they were leaving it wasn’t that surprising as they get paid about twice as much by sneaking below the 49th parallel.

Well now we have more actual statistics and real data that shows that more Canadian doctors are heading back to Canada than are leaving — and this was in 2004 when hockey was on strike so there was no real reason to go to Canada! The numbers are:

Canada has seen more doctors returning than leaving for the first time in 30 years, a report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) shows. The report, released Wednesday, says that between 2000 and 2004,the number of physicians leaving Canada declined by 38 percent. In 2004, 317 physicians returned to Canada and 262 left. That was a drop from 2000, when 420 doctors left the country and a significant decrease from the peak of 771 physicians who moved abroad in 1994.

I’m looking forward to the barrage of articles from the know-it all alleged "free-market" crowd who get spoon-fed rubbish by Frasier, PRI, Manhattan et al offering their apologies to the Canadians and admitting that their system is better than the one down here.  After all the alleged rush of Canadian doctors to the US was absolute proof in their mind that the reverse was true.

I’m waiting, I’m waiting….