I'm sure you've heard about the doctor shortage. And you're probably familiar with the old "apples" saying. But have you heard the one about how talking to a doctor today keeps new doctors away?
Some fairly frightening news is coming out of a new survey regarding the future of health care. Nine out of 10 physicians say they wouldn't recommend—and in fact would discourage—health care as a profession. And almost half of physicians say they're thinking about leaving the profession within the next five years as a result of the changes within America's health care system.
"For years, the medical profession has been predicting a shortage of health care professionals. Today, we are perilously close to a true crisis as newly insured Americans enter the health care system and our population continues to age," says Donald Palmisano, a doctor on The Doctors Company Board of Governors, which conducted the survey. "Unfortunately, we may be facing a shift from a 'calling,' which has been the hallmark for generations among physicians, that could threaten the next generation of health care professionals."
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Crisis, indeed. And health reform isn't fixing anything, docs say. It's only making it worse.
As more people are (expected to) become insured, that increases the number of patients treated per physician, making it nearly impossible to maintain or improve the quality of patient outcomes.
Most physicians surveyed also say current legislative initiatives designed to reduce health care expenses are insufficient to effectively address the underlying causes of costly defensive medicine, and an increase in patient volume will reduce the attention they're able to give to each patient. Those pressures in turn will have a negative impact on relationships with patients as it will negatively impact the level of care they can provide.
And clearly patients will be severely affected if there's no doctor at all. Talk about a one-sided relationship.
Plus, a plan to reduce federal funding for teaching hospitals in President Obama's fiscal 2013 budget proposal will curb training for primary care doctors, actually undermining a top priority of health reform, a Bloomberg Government study finds. To narrow the deficit, the president plans to save $9.7 billion over nine years by reducing what Medicare pays to train new doctors.
So how do we nurse ourselves out of this mess?
The system's backward. Having an insurance card won't mean anything if there's no doctors to take them. Without primary care doctors, health care is a moot point.
The Obama administration, the media and the Supreme Court are all weighing in on the future of health care, but the most important people aren't. The only conversation doctors are involved in is telling others not to become doctors. And that's the biggest risk of all for care.
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