What policies have been put in place that would cause the problems they are experiencing? If there is a politics issues, the policies can be talked about.
Policies like the ones in the article, the removal of complexity billing codes, drastically reducing GP earnings.
But AFAICT mostly it's their lack of constructive new models. Alberta has been fiddling at the margins with changes like dividing up the province into districts. OTOH BC introduced a wildly successful new physician pay model almost 2 years ago. I indirectly know several doctors who moved from Saskatchewan & Ontario to BC partly because of that.
P.S. I should emphasize that the new BC physician pay model not only attracts new doctors but it also encourages rostering, encouraging doctors to become the single point of generalist GP that is becoming scarce in Alberta according to the article.
My take on it is that ACA set up the insurance companies as essentially a cost-plus system. I forget the actual name for it in the ACA, but the general idea is that insurance needs to spend at least 80% of the premiums on health care. Sounds good at first pass, but there's also no limit to costs in the ACA. So the way an insurance company makes more money is to pay more for service. And the providers are happy to comply. Costs go up, insurance explicitly doesn't fight costs, so that premiums go up and they keep 20% of a bigger pie now.
I've essentially stepped out of the system. I get the cheapest, biggest deductible policy through my employer to cover a big emergency. But for my personal care, I do Direct Primary Care where I pay my doc $175/mo for my family of 4 and any time I need him, he's there "for free" no office visit fees, etc.
If I'm sick, I can always get same-day telehealth or next day in-office visits. For routine care, I may have to book out a week or so. He's never rushed because his incentive is consult me to keep me healthy so that I _don't_ need to see him. His incentives are not to keep me coming back for more visits.
During my last routine yearly visit, we had a hour long conversation about all the little nagging things that were happening has I get older, and we made a good plan on what to do.
I love this model and I could see it scaling like this:
Rather than forcing (individual mandate) ACA-specified insurance purchases, you are "forced" to put that cost into a HSA-like account (government supplemented for if you can't afford it), and then use the HSA to buy the insurance and/or DPC memberships you want and work for you. That would put downward pressure on price since you're making the decisions not the insurance/government. And you adds competition on service since you choose your providers.
