Visits to Family Physicians or Specialists by Elderly Persons in Canada and the United States: An Exploratory Comparative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this exploratory study was to compare elderly persons likelihood of visiting a family doctor/general practitioner or a medical specialist and the association of that likelihood with socioeconomic factors and health-related quality of life (a measure of perceived need) in Canada and the United States. The data were obtained from the 2002-2003 Joint Canada/United States Survey of Health. The main dependent measure was whether respondents saw a medical specialist or a general practitioner during their last health care visit. U.S. patients in the highest household income group were more likely to have seen a specialist during their last health care visit, after adjusting for potential confounding factors. Further, visits to a specialist in Canada were determined by need rather than by household income. In Canada, likelihood of specialist visits by elderly persons is systematically related to the burden of illness (need) and not systematically related to income. In the United States, the opposite is the case. These results suggest that there may be important lessons from Canada on the organization of health care services.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".