Why More U.S. Doctors Are Moving to Canada

Recruiting agencies report a surge of interest from U.S. doctors frustrated with prior authorizations, corporate consolidation, and insurance red tape that often delays or denies care.

When I was an insurance executive, whenever major health care reform bills were getting traction in Washington, my colleagues and I pulled our propaganda playbooks off the shelf and launched our fearmongering campaigns. A big part of the playbook centered on the Canadian health care system, which the insurance industry and its allies have been villainizing for decades.

We portrayed the system as a nightmare. We led people to believe that Canadians had to wait for months for medically necessary care in rundown, ill-equipped hospitals, and that government bureaucrats in Ottawa rationed everybody’s care. As a result, we claimed, Canadians were pouring across the border to see American doctors and get treatments and surgeries in U.S. hospitals that they couldn’t get at home.

We would use bogus data and make up horror stories, and we’d get our allies to use them in op-eds and our friends in Congress to recite them during committee hearings.

We intentionally misled people, as I explained in an essay for The Washington Post a few years ago. Medically necessary care is not rationed or denied in Canada like it is by U.S. health insurance companies. It’s true that there are fewer MRI machines in Canada, and some Canadians can wait weeks or months for elective procedures like knee replacements. And it’s true that some of them come to this country to get a new knee or hip (at a substantial cost). But most Canadians are proud and fiercely protective of their system.

You can be sure the insurance industry does not want you to know about a recent phenomenon: More and more U.S. doctors are moving to Canada to practice medicine because they’re fed up with how insurance companies have gained control of the U.S. health care system and how they are increasingly delaying and denying coverage for medically necessary care. Many of them are also looking north because of actions taken by the Trump administration.

In fact, during the first months of the second Trump term, the number of American doctors contacting CanAm Physician Recruiting, an agency that helps doctors move to Canada, spiked by 65 percent, according to John Philpott, CanAm’s CEO. Philpott says interest has not subsided a year later. As many as 15 U.S. physicians reach out to the agency every day seeking to escape the notorious red tape that only seems to get worse every year, and sometimes because of the current political situation, and they’re willing to work for less pay.

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And CanAm’s numbers might be conservative. The Medical Council of Canada recently told National Public Radio that its tracking of U.S. physicians who created a new account on physiciansapply.ca, typically a first step, spiked to 615 over seven months compared to just 71 in a comparable period a year earlier. That is a whopping 750 percent increase.

Philpott has been recruiting doctors from the United States since the mid-1990s, and he’s seen traffic ebb and flow during that time. When he started three decades ago, he noted that it was difficult to sell American doctors on coming to Canada because of a disadvantageous currency exchange rate as well as higher taxes north of the border. But things sharply reversed in the 2000s as Canada entered an era of tax cuts, the exchange rate improved and – facing a doctor shortage – salaries there increased.

The pace of medical migration increased in the later 2010s – partly because of unease within the professional classes over Trump’s first presidency, and partly because medicine in the United States was becoming more bureaucratic, with more red tape caused by Big Insurance, and health care becoming more corporate.

Philpott said many U.S. doctors who are considering moving to Canada talk about their long-term dissatisfaction with the business of American health care. This includes the frequent hassles of dealing with the big insurance conglomerates over issues like prior authorization but also the agony of sick patients who – because of high out-of-pocket expenses in the U.S. systems – defer needed care or disappear because of unaffordability.

“I always wanted to go into a ‘mission field,’” Alison Carleton, a longtime family doctor in Nevada told her hometown newspaper when she decided to move to a rural village in Manitoba in 2017, at the beginning of the accelerating U.S. exodus. “Canada has one payer, the government. People there have an expectation of good care and people expect that they will be cared for.”

Philadelphia physician Jesse Krikorian voiced a similar desire to escape the insurance aggravation – including spending his daily lunch break on the phone seeking prior authorizations – and economic hardships he encountered in the American system.

“I was rarely even seeing the people who were uninsured because it was just so unaffordable to them that it was only at the free clinic where I was seeing those patients,” he said. “And there were patients I had who had insurance but who were living paycheck to paycheck or kind of struggling in between. I was never able to say, ‘Please come back in one month so we can check in and see if your depression is getting any better,’ because they would be unable to swing the finances to come back and see me.”

It’s no wonder, then, that Canadian provinces from coast to coast are now reporting a dramatic uptick in U.S. doctors, aided by recent government efforts to simplify the licensing process to get started. Manitoba, the rugged, mostly rural province where both Krikorian and Carleton migrated, recently reported that it has attracted 13 American physicians since May 2024, when it launched a recruitment drive advertising “zero political interference in physician patient relationship.”

Farther west in British Columbia, a concerted effort to streamline and accelerate licensing procedures has played a role in tripling the number of U.S. applications over the past year. In the Atlantic Maritime region, Nova Scotia Health reported a flood of interest after a digital campaign launched almost immediately after Trump’s reelection, which aimed to target anxious physicians.

“The province of Ontario has expedited the licensing pathway so doctors can be immediately licensed and come and practice and allow for the processing of paperwork in the weeks to follow,” the recruiter Philpott said, describing a new ethos that’s a complete reversal of the red tape of yesteryear. “Just send us your good standing from your licensing state and you can practice [in Ontario] almost the next day.”

Those doctors who do make the big move find a system that – like every health system in the world – has some flaws, such as longer waits for certain kinds of tests or procedures. But overall, the American newcomers are happy with the advantages of the Canadian system.

“Because I work at a community health center, a lot of the patients who I see are people who in the U.S. would probably be uninsured – just with their background, the type of job they work, things like that,” said Krikorian, who began practicing in Winnipeg last summer. “Here, coming to the doctor is not a financial hardship. They can come as often as they need.”

All of this is great news for Canada, which has long struggled with a shortage of physicians – especially family doctors like Krikorian or Carleton. But it’s also a horrendous indictment of the current state of health care in the United States, which had long been considered the gold standard for global medicine. If America can’t find its way to reform a system of exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, profit-motivated insurance companies, and warped political interference, the Great White North will continue to look like a better way of life to many of this country’s best practitioners.