Slouching towards socialized medicine

If you love Canada's single-payer system, you'll love Massachusetts. From the Boston Globe: "Across Massachusetts, wait to see doctors grows":

The wait to see primary care doctors in Massachusetts has grown to as long as 100 days, while the number of practices accepting new patients has dipped in the past four years, with care the scarcest in some rural areas.

Now, as the state's health insurance mandate threatens to make a chronic doctor shortage worse, the Legislature has approved an unprecedented set of financial incentives for young physicians, and other programs to attract primary care doctors. But healthcare leaders fear the new measures will take several years to ease the shortage.

Meanwhile, in my neck of the woods:

Amherst family physician Kate Atkinson decided to open her practice to new patients in January partly so she could take on the newly insured, especially since, by her count, 18 doctors in the area had closed their practices over the last two years. Most of those physicians have become hospitalists, caring for patients in the hospital, she said.

Because primary doctors are some of the lowest paid in medicine, Beacon Hill has decided to spend more taxpayer money to call the program a "success" instead of letting the market set the price for a scare resource.

Extra - John Stossel has more on Canadians flying to the States for treatment. Not Massachusetts, Montana.