Where Have All The Doctors Gone?
November 21, 2009 Harlingen, Texas, November 21, 2009: I had to visit my doctor the other day. I only had a forty-minute wait before being checked into an examining room, followed by another thirty-minute wait before my doctor walked through the door. It wasn’t too bad this time and I did take my latest W.E.B. Griffin adventure book along to keep me company. My wife also had a visit to her doctor this week. She too had about two hours of waiting time. All of this delay happened even with appointments scheduled weeks in advance. The problem seems to be far reaching. Long delays before doctors can examine patients are the rule, rather than the exception. The problem is brought about by two very important factors. First, doctors must schedule more and more people very tightly to obtain the volume of business they need to meet expenses and gain a profit. The second problem is, we have a huge shortage of primary care physicians all across the country. It is estimated that we now have about 700,000 doctors serving patients in the United States. Of that number, more than 600,000 have elected to enter specialized fields of medicine, ranging from surgery to dermatology. They are rarely the first responders in the case of family emergencies. This leaves only about 100,000 doctors who are actively pursuing careers in primary care or family medicine. These are the doctors patients most often wish to see. Unfortunately, these are also the very healthcare providers that are in short supply. All too often, a person needing primary care never gets to see a doctor at all. In cities and towns across the country nurse practitioners have taken over the role of providing care for most of the common complaints seen during office visits. On top of the physician shortage problem is the aging of medical providers. Just to fill the vacancies brought about by retirement, medical schools need to graduate 7,000 to 10,000 doctors a year. Those numbers replace losses, but do nothing to add numbers to a profession that is already experiencing shortages. Now we have a new element inserted into the existing serious problem mix. The Obama Administration and the Democrat Congress plan to add somewhere around 40 million new patients to already overloaded medical practices. The current bill, more than 2,000 pages long, has a lot of pork and special interest money attached to it, but does not include a single dollar to provide for more physicians to handle the increased patient load. We already have small towns and cities with no hospitals and few doctors. We have blighted urban areas where no doctors will establish practices. We have large population centers where people spend entire days waiting for a few minutes with a medical practitioner. What will the scene look like when we add another 40 million people seeking immediate care? From this vantage point it looks as if rationed medical care is fast becoming a reality. | |
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