Internship: Cost Recovery for Uninsured Services

Summary

The purpose of this project was to respond to the current shortage of General Practitioners (GPs) by suggesting an approach that would increase GP compensation. It focused on the potential impact of merging the income streams from uninsured services provided by doctors with the delivery of insured services. In practice, this could be allowing physicians to expand the uninsured services they provide while maintaining a typical GP practice, and allowing GPs to set competitive rates for the services that they elect to provide.

Grant Outputs

Payment Is Powerful: Overcoming Canada’s shortage of GPs by increasing family practice compensation – http://www.aims.ca/site/media/aims/Rayson.pdf

This report notes that the Canadian health system is suffering from a lack of general practitioners (GPs) because GPs are insufficiently compensated for their services. In order to attract more medical students into primary care service delivery, this report recommends three means of increasing GP wages. These include more aggressive billing for uninsured services, joining a cooperative of health care practitioners, or focusing on a sub-specialization within primary care for which the GP could directly charge patients.