VIEWPOINT: Training more doctors won’t solve British Columbia’s crisis in health care
Published 2:00 pm Monday, December 22, 2025
Addressing the “crisis” in health care by training more doctors – especially family doctors – will not work.
There are more family doctors per 100,000 Canadians today than a few decades ago.
B.C. leads Canada in that respect, with 270 family doctors per 100,000 British Columbians, up from 162 in
1976.
But the practice of medicine has been afflicted, among other things, by capitalism, a “disease” that for 500 years has harmed human society as a whole.
Capitalism is defined by the International Monetary Fund as a system in which individuals own and control property in accord with their interests. Their essential motive is making a profit.
Capitalism itself is inextricably rooted in the colonial era, when European nations, armed with large ships and powerful weapons, prowled the planet and subjugated other peoples, seizing and exploiting their resources for themselves.
The practice of healing has always worked in the opposite way to capitalism – and colonialism.
Instead of seeking to make a profit or to exploit others, its goal has been to engender health and ease suffering, respecting a person’s autonomy and subjugating the healer’s own needs to the needs of patients. The primary motive is not making a profit but facilitating natural processes necessary for a restoration of well being.
The official rule of medicine is “in the first place, do no harm.”
Today, capitalistic principles have been elevated to quasi-religion status, and profit-taking and wealth accumulation interfere with healing on all sides, especially for doctors.
At the beginning of medical training, students are told that they are critically important – the pillar of health care. But thereafter the material costs of a medical education –once largely subsidized by society as a whole – are borne by students.
Medical training is now a commodity for sale, and students, facing fearsome indebtedness (up to a half million dollars) are blandly assured they’ll recoup it in practice.
Trainees today are more often wealthy or come from wealthy backgrounds.
Bankers and loan officers fall all over themselves throwing money at medical students. That’s because once in practice, we doctors – unlike all other health professionals – are paid directly out of the public purse. The economy can go up and down, but doctors’ fees never decline or disappear.
We also have vast autonomy not available to other health professionals.
We practice where we want, work as much or as little as we want, focus on any aspect of medicine that we wish, and even limit access to our services – either to serve more patients or to increase profitability – in almost any way we wish (e.g. the one-problem-per-five minute visit).
In reality, healing the health care system involves many other players besides physicians.
It is now clear that non-medical factors – cultural and economic factors, personal behaviour and community structures – shape a person’s overall health far more than what the health-care system accomplishes.
Training more doctors will fail as the definitive and sufficient answer to the health care system’s problems.
The solution lies in the hands of society as a whole.
Warren Bell is a long-time family physician in Salmon Arm with a consuming interest and involvement in community and global affairs.
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