Doctor shortage ahead, study says
PORTLAND, Ore. - As Congress works to revamp America’s health care system, a new study concludes that in a little over 10 years the nation will come up short in the number of doctors it’ll need.
The study by the Association of American Medical Colleges found that the United States will end up 159,000 doctors short in 15 years and most will be primary care physicians.
Many experts say primary caregivers are the key to curbing high health care costs.
One factor to the decline in primary caregivers is that fewer medical students are choosing primary care for a career because it pays less than other types of doctors. The average family doctor earns around $160,000 a year compared to the average specialist who earns $300,000 or more a year.
Dr. Paul Hochfeld, an emergency room physician at a Corvallis hospital said the incentive to go into primary care is not there.
“Why would you be stupid enough to go into primary care if you’re smart enough to go to medical school - just from a financial standpoint?” he said.
Dr. Lisa Dodson, an associate professor at Oregon Health Sciences University, said the financial aspect is often reinforced in medical school.
“Faculty are telling them, ‘don’t do that, it’s a waste of your time.’ Or ‘you can’t make any money. You won’t have the prestige.’ Those kinds of things,” she said. “That really affects students in an active way.” It is an unfortunate trend, she said.
Respected research from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland shows that having a primary caregiver to act as a person’s long-term health guide keeps people healthier.
Dodson agrees. “Primary care access treats problems at their origins, hopefully before they become a problem but also in the early stages of an illness before it becomes expensive, harder to take care of and more traumatic for the patient,” she said.
Dr. David Shute, who is a primary care physician at Greenfield Health in Southwest Portland, sees the value in establishing long-term relationships with patients which is why he chose to become a primary care physician.
“I wanted to get to know people over time,” he said. “I wanted to work to make their lives better and help them be healthier and primary care was really the right place to do that.”
One of his patients, Howard Shapiro agrees. “I walked in and he knew who I was, gave me a big hug, and welcomed me. I wasn’t a number,” he said.
But checking in on patients, while efficient, takes time and most insurance companies don’t cover it.
Dr. Shute and his colleagues at Greenfield Health have developed a way to bridge that gap on their own.
“We do ask our patients to pay an annual fee and that ranges from about $190 to around $600 per year,” he said.
That retainer fee helps cover the cost of the time it takes to check in with patients with e-mails and phone calls, which Shute says allows him to spend more quality time with fewer patients.
Patients like Shapiro. “When we’re dealing with our bodies, we want a personal assistant,” Shapiro said.
Ideas under consideration to encourage more people to enter primary care include boosting loan repayment programs and bridging the salary gap between primary care and specialists.
There’s also a push to rely more on physician assistants and nurse practitioners, but they are also in short supply.
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