The baby boomers are still pretty healthy. In fact, right now is the golden age. If you look at baby boomers, they're still old enough to be paying taxes. The oldest baby boomers are 65. Serious medical costs don't start for another five or ten years.
So the aging population hitting medicare hasn't actually happened yet. When it does happen, most estimates argue that you're talking about an increase in the number of physicians or physician services of something in the order of 0.6% per year. It's not enormous.
Yes, there is going to be a need to change down the road to reduce the number of physicians. You're talking about a time beyond the career of the typical graduate today.
There is a bigger issue. In some sense, you're worried about shortages, but inside most provincial ministries, which are closer to the ground, the concern is about surpluses, not shortages.
Depending on whether they're family practitioners or specialists, there is a six to ten-year training period for physicians. If you go back ten years exactly, there has been a 73% increase in the number of people in medical school, which is dramatically larger than population growth, which has been around 11% in the same period. We're going to need to be pulling back our enrolment in medical school in the near future, or else we're going to have a giant surplus.
The issue of aging is not actually about the number of physicians; it's about the composition of specialities. We really haven't started dealing with that as a society yet. We have the wrong specialities graduating from medical school. If you think someone is going to practice for 30 years, you need to be thinking about what specialities we will need over the next 30 years. We are graduating a lot of pediatricians and not so many geriatricians. We need to think about those things.