Access to Physician Services in Quebec: Relative Influence of Household Income and Area of Residence

The 1960s were marked by the setting up of Medicare by federal and provincial governments in Canada. The official aim of this undertaking was to eliminate inequality of access to medical care, and in the first instance inequality on the basis of incomes. Governments were also concerned with inequality in the regional distribution of medical services. The objective of this paper is to document these two dimensions of accessibility to medical services as present in Quebec in 1991 in terms of household consumption of such services. Data for this study come from administrative files, principally those of the Quebec ministry of health. The paper reviews measures taken by the Quebec government to attract doctors to locate in outlying regions of the province. In spite of these measures, results obtained indicate that significant differences existed in 1991 between outlying and central regions and that results for intermediate regions occur between these two poles. After controlling for age of head and household composition, differences by income are no longer significant.