… is from page 167 of James Ted McDonald’s, Casey Warman’s, and Christopher Worswick’s paper “Earnings, Occupations, and Schooling Decisions of Immigrants with Medical Degrees: Evidence for Canada and the United States,” which is Chapter 6 of High-Skilled Immigration in a Global Labor Market, Barry R. Chiswick, ed. (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 2011), pp. 165-198:
In a recent paper, Phillips and others (2007)* examine administrative data from the American Medical Association, the Canadian Medical Association, and other sources to document the extent to which Canadian-educated physicians are working in the United States and U.S.-educated physicians are working in Canada. They find that while only 408 U.S.-educated physicians were working in direct patient care in Canada in 2004, 8,162 Canadian-educated physicians were working in direct patient care in the United States in 2006, and close to 70 percent of these physicians were specialists. Canadian-educated specialists in the United States represent 19 percent of the Canadian specialist workforce, while Canadian-educated primary-care physicians in the United States represent 8 percent of the Canadian general-practitioner workforce. Overall, one in nine Canadian-educated physicians are practicing in the United States; after excluding U.S.-born physicians educated in Canada, still one in twelve are practicing in the United States. They conclude that physician emigration to the United States is in fact an important contributing factor to the shortage of physicians in Canada.
*Robert L. Phillips, Jr., Stephen Petterson, George E. Fryer, Jr., and Walter Rosser, “The Canadian contribution to the US physician workforce, Canadian Medical Association Journal, Vol. 8, pp. 1083-87.
One lesson: people respond predictably to prices, even when those prices are dictated by a well-intentioned government and even when those prices are of health-care resources.
