USAToday has an alarming front page story today about a looming shortage of primary care physicians. From the story:
Longer days, lower pay, less prestige and more administrative headaches have turned doctors away in droves from family medicine, presumed to be the frontline for wellness and preventive-care programs that can help reduce health care costs. The number of U.S. medical school students going into primary care has dropped 51.8% since 1997, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP)…
Considering it takes 10 to 11 years to educate a doctor, the drying up of the pipeline is a big concern to health-care experts. The AAFP is predicting a shortage of 40,000 family physicians in 2020, when the demand is expected to spike. The U.S. health care system has about 100,000 family physicians and will need 139,531 in 10 years. The current environment is attracting only half the number needed to meet the demand.
Rather than trying to remake the entire health care system, I suggest that the POTUS and Congress get to work on this very real problem. We need to induce more physicians to go into primary care, allow physician’s assistants and certified nurse practitioners to do more primary care–under the aegis of a physician, etc.
Reform is needed. But not the current omnibus approaches that try to remake the world and obscure issues, like the physician shortage. In other words, stop trying to do it all and focus!
August 18th, 2009 | 2:27 pm
[...] & Obama James Pethokoukis: A Health Care Plan to Save a Presidency Wesley J. Smith: We need more primary care doctors Mona Charen: Canada, Health Care and More Frank J: Aren’t Obamites tired of calling people [...]
August 20th, 2009 | 11:35 pm
Obvious easy way to increase the number of potential primary-care physicians: get rid of the resident’s punishing work hours. Ambitious future surgeons are much more likely to accept this as the price to pay; potential internists or pediatricians are much more likely to go into a different line of work on account of this hurdle or perhaps, as an old high-school friend of mine decided, become an overqualified RN instead.
August 24th, 2009 | 3:22 pm
There was a TV show quite some time back about a town in Alaska that paid for a doctor’s education with his promise to become their doctor.
Recently mentioned to the doctor who is Lt. Gov. in KY and is thinking of running for US Senator about why there are not more Medical Schools since we need more doctors. He blamed it on Fed. Gov.
My thought is that those into population control who have promoted abortion are now going to take care of the rest of us and not in a nice way. The population may indeed get down to 2 billion as some want.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact