On Monday, the Wall Street Journal posted an article about the coming shortage of doctors. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, at current graduation and training rates, the nation will face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next fifteen years. We are facing a shortage of Primary Care Physicians, doctors whose role will in patient care will grow under the new healthcare reform bill recently passed.
According to the article:
"The U.S. has 352,908 primary-care doctors now, and the college association estimates that 45,000 more will be needed by 2020. But the number of medical-school students entering family medicine fell more than a quarter between 2002 and 2007."
Currently, there are efforts being made to solve this problem. There are incentives in the healthcare reform act to encourage people to become doctors and there is a 10 percent Medicare pay boost for primary-care doctors. There have also been some new medical schools opening around the country. There is, however, a bottleneck in the planned growth in the number of doctors--there is a shortage of medical resident positions.
According to the article:
"There are about 110,000 resident positions in the U.S., according to the AAMC. Teaching hospitals rely heavily on Medicare funding to pay for these slots. In 1997, Congress imposed a cap on funding for medical residencies, which hospitals say has increasingly hurt their ability to expand the number of positions."
There is a map at the bottom of the article showing the number of doctors per patient in each state. Please follow the link above to view the map.
This problem is not totally the result of the new healthcare reform bill, but because of the number of people who will suddenly be insured and seeking primary care physicians, the healthcare reform bill will make the doctor shortage more obvious more quickly.
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