The impact of the 2008/2009 financial crisis on specialist physician activity in Canada

M. Ruth Lavergne, Lindsay Hedden, Michael R. Law, Kim McGrail, Megan Ahuja and Morris Barer

Health Economics, 2018, vol. 27, issue 11, 1859-1867

Abstract: Fee‐for‐service physicians are responsible for planning for their retirements, and there is no mandated retirement age. Changes in financial markets may influence how long they remain in practice and how much they choose to work. The 2008 crisis provides a natural experiment to analyze elasticity in physician service supply in response to dramatic financial market changes. We examined quarterly fee‐for‐service data for specialist physicians over the period from 1999/2000 to 2013/2014 in Canada. We used segmented regression to estimate changes in the number of physicians receiving payments, per‐physician service counts, and per‐physician payments following the 2008 financial crisis and explored whether patterns differed by physician age. The number of specialist physicians increased more rapidly in the period since 2008 than in earlier years, but increases were largest within the youngest age group, and we observed no evidence of delayed retirement among older physicians. Where changes in service volume and payments were observed, they occurred across all ages and not immediately following the 2008 financial crisis. We conclude that any response to the financial crisis was small compared with demographic shifts in the physician population and changes in payments per service over the same time period.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.3786

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:27:y:2018:i:11:p:1859-1867

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().