A family physician is a small-business person struggling with high costs and overhead. Many find that their practice has become stressful and is no longer viable.

Ontario is getting billions of dollars for health care via the federal government, but the big question is whether the massive infusion of cash will fix a system that is broken on many levels.

The provincial government first announced a $110-million investment to create 53 new primary-care teams and expand 25 existing ones. The federal government followed with a $3.1-billion agreement with Ontario to hire hundreds of physicians and nurses, reduce wait times and modernize digital infrastructure to free doctors from laborious record-keeping.

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All this comes in the midst of a primary-care crisis in which 2.3 million Ontarians — about 150,000 of them in Ottawa — do not have a family doctor. As well, long waits for surgeries have bedevilled hospitals, and emergency departments across the province have closed for days or weeks for lack of nurses. “Crisis” may be an understatement to describe what’s happening to........

© Ottawa Citizen