The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) has just released information on average fee-for-service payments for physicians who received at least $50 000 in such payments from a provincial medicare plan in 1999/2000. Since these figures are based on gross fee-for-service payments, the CMA has used overhead information collected in its annual Physician Resource Questionnaire (PRQ) to estimate average net professional income earned from these payments. Estimated overhead is an average of figures reported by survey respondents, some of whom are paid primarily via fee-for-service payments, plus others who are not.
The 1998 PRQ results indicated that overhead expenses for physicians averaged 32% of gross income, ranging from an estimated high of 36% for family physicians to 28% for specialists.
When the PRQ results are applied to the CIHI data, estimated 1999/2000 average net incomes from fee-for-service payments (before taxes) were $119 872 for FPs and $178 906 for specialists.
Results for the 1998 PRQ survey are accurate within ±2.2%, 19 times out of 20. — Lynda Buske, Associate Director of Research, CMA