Are specialists stealing primary care patients?

The fact that this is an issue at all tells me one thing:

there is no doctor shortage.

Good grief people no speicalist would wnat to manage HTN unless they absolutely had no choice because their specialty pool of patients was too small.

If specialists are really taking on primary care, its only because there is a surplus of specialists.

Since all internal medicine specialists are required to do a general medicine residency before their specialty fellowship, it is natural that some would want to keep a hand in primary care.
To eliminate this problem, physicians should be allowed to do fellowship training after only 2 years of general medicine residency.

Funny. I am now routinely being sent patients for follow up visits from the ER and Urgent Care centers. And it’s for mindane thinbgs like Otitis Media, Pharyngitis etc.

The typical story is that their PCP’s are too busy to see them,. but somehow these patients get squeezed in on my schedule as a specialist.

There is some perverse incentive at work in primary care with respect to advanced access and maintaining accesss for thier existing panel of patients. The spillover has to go somewhere and increasingly it is the specialist who is taking up the slack.

I can’t speak for other specialists, but I have ZERO desire to see such patients. I don’t think anyone can accuse me of “steaqling” these patients.

I’d say that this situation argues that there is indeed a shortage of PRIMARY CARE physicians in this country.