McQUARRIE – Suppose we hired 200 doctors and paid students’ tuition?
What if we gave students money to help with their tuition? (Image: Armchair Mayor file photo)
SUPPOSE, just for a moment, that B.C. decided to hire and pay a salary to doctors willing to locate to communities outside of the Lower Mainland.
For sake of argument, let’s say we committed to pay 200 doctors, $150,000 a year to set up practice in the Interior. Add in another 25 per cent for benefits and the total annual cost to we the taxpayer would be $37,500,000 a year.
Apart from health, education is another vital part of our community as it creates future wealth by training the next generation of workers.
In Newfoundland Labrador they have lowered tuition and made the provincial portion of any student loan a non-repayable grant.
Bill McQuarrie is a Kamloops entrepreneur. He can be contacted at billmcquarrie@gmail.com. He tweets @bafflegabbed.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
One does not need to be a rocket scientist to see that this solution should be put into practice at once !! R.I H crys that they are swamped and everyone knows the wait time in emerg. Is long and frustrating . Could that be because Interior health has SHUT DOWN the smaller outlying hospitals BECAUSE they say there is no Doctors..Take the recruitment away from college of physicians , and rid the people of the “club” that decides,cause it might mean they would put a. Limit on their half million dollar salaries . Let’s allow some well trained Doctors from wherever to practice here….. BUT in smaller rural hospitals where they are desperately needed
Are there 150 trained doctors or Nurse-practitioners available to hire right now?. If there were, I’d be all for it. I haven’t done the research though. There are, however, some foreign-trained qualified doctors that have been trained in places like Poland, Ireland and Australia, not exactly the third world, that are prevented through bureaucratic wrangling from practicing here. Perhaps in the immediate something could be done to allow them to work in the field they have trained and are qualified for. As to Site C, we hear steadily from folks concerned about climate change, and advocating for wholesale increased use of electric cars/less reliance on fossil fuels, that we don’t need Site C. It seems to me though, that charging your electric car batteries using coal or gas generated power has no net benefit for the environment. The power for electric cars has to come from somewhere, and BC is one of the few places in the world where re-charging electric cars by actually using a renewable resource makes sense.