
                               FAMILY FINANCES

                              By ROBERT WALKER
                               Calgary Herald

     CALGARY - Family doctor Brendan Adams grosses $170,000 a year in
     his downtown practice.

     It may sound like a lot of money, he says, but he's only just been
     able to afford an annual holiday - a modest two weeks at a nearby
     mountain resort.

     Adams, like many Canadian doctors, feels the public doesn't
     understand how he works and what he really earns.

     The former Torontonian says doctors have huge overheads and other
     expenses which most people don't appreciate.

     He left 11 years of university with $24,000 in loans to repay.

     After he'd done his residency in 1984 it cost the 36-year-old GP
     $50,000 to set up office in a professional building across the
     street from Calgary General Hospital.

     But he says the real cost came when he opened the doors in the
     beginning and waited for the first patients to find out he was
     there.

     ``The real cost of setting up is the tremendous debt you rack up
     while you are running a business that is losing money. The clock
     starts running at about $30 an hour and there are no patients. It's
     terrifying.''

     After his near-empty office closed at 5 p.m. he'd moonlight at the
     General's emergency department, as a fill-in for other doctors and
     in walk-in clinics.

     Now he has a partner to share the costs, which run at $8,000 a
     month, but he's always aware if he's away the costs are still
     piling up.

     ``If I'm not here this place hemorrhages cash. I've not missed a
     day of work since I set up.''

     Now working a 60-hour week he nets about $100,000 a year, he says.
     After tax he takes home about $1,000 a week.

        See <15health> for comparison of Calgary opthamologist's salary
        See <17health> for discussion of rual doctors

     But he stresses there's no holiday pay, no pension plan or fringe
     benefits.

     ``If you go into it as a business you're going to be deeply
     disappointed. But if you go into it for other reasons, as most of
     us do, it's a reasonably good job.''

     He plans for a future when he believes medicare will die in its
     present form and doctors will be the losers.

     That means more and more occupational health work for companies -
     seeing employees, consulting and giving medicals.

     ``Medicare is a losing proposition. My aim is to eventually be 50
     per cent in each camp.''

     Adams says the downside of his life as a doctor is living in a
     society without faith where patients worship technology.

     ``They see me as the priest of technology in my white coat, even
     though I don't wish to be and never sought that role.''

     He draws strength from a belief that people are basically good.

     ``They don't come in here to waste my time. Even if their need to
     me is a silly one, to them it's real.

     ``They take it seriously and I take them seriously. If you do that
     you get a lot of reward,'' he says.

     ``If you view them as a mass of complaining nuisances all you get
     is frustrated and burnt out.''

