HolyCoast: The Coming Doctor Shortage
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Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The Coming Doctor Shortage

Good luck finding a physician in a few years:
The new federal health-care law has raised the stakes for hospitals and schools already scrambling to train more doctors.


Experts warn there won't be enough doctors to treat the millions of people newly insured under the law. At current graduation and training rates, the nation could face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.


That shortfall is predicted despite a push by teaching hospitals and medical schools to boost the number of U.S. doctors, which now totals about 954,000.


The greatest demand will be for primary-care physicians. These general practitioners, internists, family physicians and pediatricians will have a larger role under the new law, coordinating care for each patient.
The actual numbers will be worse than what this article is reporting because it doesn't take into consideration the number of people who will be discouraged from going into the medical field because of how badly Obamacare will treat doctors and patients. They're not only going to have problems graduating enough doctors, but they will have problems recruiting people to go through all the years and expense to become doctors if the end result is working for something that looks like the DMV.

2 comments:

Ann's New Friend said...

Rush had a caller today who pointed to the relationship between the student loan legislation and the health-care bill. It is, irony of irony, everything that Reagan predicted: government control of -- everything.

Nalls Produce said...

This issue goes beyond doctors. It impacts a wide array of professions across the entire health care industry. Julian Alssid with the Workforce Strategy Center wrote a piece in Huffington about the problem and what can be done to address it...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julian-l-alssid/finding-a-cure-for-the-he_b_503774.html