A friend sent this post from Plum Village monastery regarding the holiday season. I don’t think I could really add much to the message so I’ll just post the link: http://plumvillage.org/news/a-green-santa-and-a-hug-of-love/

One sentence that popped out at me: “We do not need to wait for our governments and corporations to do the right thing.” It looks like such a simple sentence, but how to put it into practice? I suppose that buying less stuff this Christmas would make a difference, but it then begs the question, if we spend less on stuff, what should we do with that time or money instead? How could it be better used? I suppose that if we didn’t have to spend that time and money shopping, we could improve our knowledge to add more value to the world, spend the time with someone we care about, go look at some art, walk around in the park, clean the garage, catch up on paperwork so we’re less stressed… actually, there are a lot of things we could be doing that would make our world a better place. Maybe just about anything would be better than spending money to buy people things when we’re not even sure if they need or want them, or buying things for ourselves that we don’t need just because it’s Boxing Day.

So maybe I will add to the message: this Christmas, let’s give the world the gift of not being stressed out and broke.

Andre Picard made some good points in the Globe & Mail two days ago, entitled “Honest talk about private health services is long overdue” – points that need to be made in light of the current debt crisis / austerity hysteria that is overtaking our province.

Perhaps the most important observation is that contrary to what many people believe, Canada does not have a fully publicly funded health care system. For all the people who protest two-tier health care, the truth is, we already have it. Mr. Picard elaborates in more detail in his article, so I don’t have to, but the essence is that some aspects of health care (like physician services) are covered by public insurance, whereas others (like most dental services, and medications for many people) are not.

Mr. Picard observes that there is a problem with the way that “medically necessary” services are covered by public insurance and services that are deemed not medically necessary are not. As he points out, this distinction at times becomes ridiculous.

“Some delineation is positively absurd: Some provinces pay for cancer drugs if you take them in hospital, but not if you take the same drugs at home. Psychiatric care is covered, but most psychological care is not.”

In my field, this absurdity is painfully obvious. A course of psychotherapy from a psychologist for a depressed person would not be medically necessary (even if prescribed by a physician), but the same treatment provided by a medical doctor would be. In practical terms, this means that it in theory it might be possible for me to expand my clinic and provide care for more people by providing counseling through allied professionals under psychiatric supervision – try to leverage my skill set to see more people. However, I would need to fund that privately (so that rich people could access this kind of care, but other people would not), or find some other alternate funding source. However, the province would fully fund me to spend most of my time asking about symptoms and doing counseling that another (probably less expensive) provider could do, because I couldn’t bill for the service if I hired someone to do it under my supervision. Meanwhile, the size of my practice maxes out at 150 patients or so, more or less depending on how frequent the appointments are and how long they are. What is even more absurd is that I could make the same income seeing the same 30 patients every single week for the next 10 years and beyond. Dr. Paul Kurdyak discusses this issue in a study covered by this article in Maclean’s.

I’m not putting down psychoanalysis or long-term psychotherapy. I do a small amount of that kind of work, I’ve seen it help people greatly over time, and yes, I think in some cases it is the best treatment. If psychiatrists want to spend some or all of our time doing that kind of work, more power to them. The decline of psychodynamic thinking and deep self-reflection in our work, in favour of prescribing, is in many ways lamentable (and I prescribe a lot of medications). What I do think, however, is that it does not make sense that some people can access this treatment with public money if they can manage to see a psychiatrist, and the rest of the population cannot. Deciding whether something is medically necessary or not based on who is providing the service is a rather strange way of rationing care. That is not really equal access, but it pretends to be. Everyone who buys a ticket has an equal chance of winning the lottery, but most of them won’t walk away with money in their hands.

It also does not make sense that what might be more efficient models of service delivery may never be incentivized under the current funding model. Also, much of our preventative care is an out-of-pocket luxury while we spend thousands or more to treat someone after their life has completely broken down. I don’t think that type of issue is limited to psychiatry. It also goes far beyond funding – I believe good mental hygiene is not expensive, but it does take a lot of time and effort. This is not something someone can do for you. You have to put in the work.

So, what is medically necessary?

I think this is the kind of thing we should be discussing at a higher level (in addition to other questions, like – how did Ontario become the world’s most indebted sub-sovereign borrower and what does that have to do with health care), but we are deadlocked at the level of squabbling about unilateral action. In our current mental health system, we pay the architect to lay the bricks and build the house himself, and since it costs too much we’re are now trying to pay him less to do it. We’ve totally missed the point, haven’t we?

The Ontario government recently announced another 1.3% cut to physician OHIP billings applied across the board, following cuts that happened in January of this year. I’m happy to see this has been hotly discussed in the news, and online. Dr. Ming Yu’s article in the Huffington Post, for example, has gone viral (according to the OMA). Most of the current debate, as far as I can tell, centers on the plight of doctors – are we are being undervalued and disrespected, or maybe we are too wealthy and entitled?

There doesn’t seem to be much argument about the discrepancy between projected growth in health expenses and the increases in funding to health care in the budget. Whoever is making the estimate, the consistent point seems to be that anticipated growth in healthcare expenses will exceed increases in government funding of health care. We can spend a lot of time talking about how much doctors get paid, but it made me wonder, if the government is willing to make this potentially very unpopular move (if comments on Kathleen Wynne’s Facebook page are a reliable indicator) what does that say about their other options – and the current state of our health system and economy?

I couldn’t sleep the other night, and here is what I found out: the Fraser Institute published “Ontario’s Debt Balloon: Source and Sustainability” in February 2015. To sum it up, it says the source of Ontario’s debt balloon, which reportedly expanded from 28% of the provincial economy in 2008/09 to an expected 40% in 2014/15, is mostly due to high operating expenses, and that without significant changes, the level of debt is unsustainable, i.e. the province will default on its debt at the rate it’s going. Ontario’s credit rating was downgraded in 2012. The Council of Canadians published “A Difficult Road Ahead: Canada’s Economic and Fiscal Prospects” in 2014. It concluded: “If spending on health care increases at rates close to the pace recorded over the past decade, Canada’s provinces and territories will have to raise taxes to avoid deficits growing even larger.” “If Canadians don’t want to pay higher taxes to cover surging expenditures on health care, the only other option will be to cut spending on social programs and education”. Blame our current woes on mismanagement by our government, but it seems to be a nationwide issue.

This is a selected representation of sources; maybe other authors have reached different conclusions about our state of affairs. However, working with very basic assumptions it seems possible to reach similar conclusions. In a big-picture sense – and I think these observations would be accepted by a casual observer – the population is aging and health care costs are therefore rising. For the same reason, revenue (and future revenue) is shrinking. Furthermore, economic growth on a worldwide level cannot continue indefinitely as it involves extracting finite resources from the planet. The idea that the province is in massive debt is another extra detail. Therefore, we are going to have major problems sustaining our current way of delivering health care regardless of whose fault it is (and maybe it isn’t anybody’s fault), and maybe what is happening now to physicians is a sign that we finally can’t keep throwing more money at the problem, because the credit line is maxed out.

To the doctors posting in online forums that they feel undervalued and they are thinking about moving elsewhere, so the government should pay us more – I think we need to grieve, and then we also need to move on, for our own good. To put it another way, if you see steam coming out of your faucets you should wonder if maybe your house is burning down instead of worrying about what is wrong with the tap. We could diversify our income streams, cut expenses, reduce our lifestyle, even look at overseas options, however one wants to cope in the short term. Then, we can move on to deciding if we should be advocating for cuts to other social services, convincing the public they need to pay more taxes, abandoning the idea of universal healthcare,  coming up with our own proposal for rationing health care, or some other plan of action to dramatically increase efficiency. Unilateral cuts aside, we’re all citizens and we’re going to need health care someday.

Even if I don’t agree with the Health Minister’s actions, I can certainly thank him for getting me (and other physicians all across the province, and the public) more engaged in thinking about the situation of health care in Ontario. If not for the repeated pay cuts I probably wouldn’t have turned onto the fact that big problems have been brewing for quite some time and that we really need to do something about it.

To be fair, I think doctors and the public are thinking about the bigger picture. The public discourse seems to be focusing mostly on the (relatively) smaller issue of physician compensation, but I imagine people are thinking about the larger context. We are likely to face some difficult questions as a society – are we going to spend proportionally more on health care, or are we going to accept that health care needs to look different than it does now, and different in what ways? How much can we gain by making health care delivery more efficient? If we can’t make up the difference by increasing efficiency, what do we cut? How little we can get away with paying our professionals before we really start hurting from it? Which ones can we really do without? If we have to start cutting services, how will we decide which ones? Can we go further down the road of the two-tier health, shifting more services into the private sector for those who can pay for them?

I haven’t heard anybody saying that universal public health care is unsustainable and dying a slow, inevitable death, and I hope it’s because that’s not true. The conspiracy theory loving part of me can’t help but wonder if all the hand-waving about cuts to physicians is a distraction from the larger issue, because the political will to confront the difficult questions doesn’t exist and whoever brings it to the attention of the public is going to look bad. On the other hand, to echo Dr. Gail Beck’s sentiment – it is a good time to be a doctor in Ontario. I would add, maybe there hasn’t been a better time in a long while. There’s nothing like a crisis to put into perspective what really matters.

This post comes a day too late – this really should have been posted Nov 25, which is the official day.

A few years ago I was approached rather aggressively by a volunteer at a hospital, who was pushing a white ribbon on me. “Where’s your ribbon?” he demanded. It was on my other coat, I replied, which was actually true. He then insisted that I take another one, implying that I should be ashamed as a man not to show solidarity with others working to eliminate violence against women.

This incident left a lingering bad memory – I’m still of the opinion that participation in a cause that comes under the threat of shame or humiliation isn’t really valid participation – but a few years later I’ve come to see the relevance of the white ribbon, and I think I also know why I was reluctant to put it on. Violence in general, and specifically against women, is scary and horrifying. It is easier not to think about it, maybe because it occurs too often, and the perpetrators are not so easily identified as someone “other” than us (not only soldiers, criminals, gangsters, but ordinary people). Even one woman affected by violence is too much, though, because violence against women and how we choose to handle it are choices and therefore violence can be prevented and changed. As physicians, we all know someone who has been affected, and the mental and emotional impact can be profound.

Too often we do not call it what it is; a rape is not called a rape – it is labelled something else, like a “sexual assault”, which is not incorrect but also is much more vague a term. We may talk about criminal harassment as “unwanted attention”, which might be accurate but doesn’t convey the sense that it is also damaging, illegal, and morally wrong. Maybe as men we have pursued someone a bit too much so we are reluctant to see ourselves as potentially being abusers, or we fear causing offense by using a word with shameful connotations – so we use euphemisms.

How can a person be treated for an illness if the illness is never named and identified? It is uncomfortable, certainly, to tell someone they have cancer. But we would never think to leave the diagnosis unnamed, and just give them chemotherapy anyway. I have noticed the temptation in myself, however, to treat depression and PTSD that are consequences of violence and gloss over the cause. Minimizing the violence sends a message, overtly or covertly, that what happened was somehow OK, and I don’t think that’s helpful for the individual or for our society. I could be doing better with this, and the white ribbon is a good reminder.