Keep the pressure on. Maybe they’re listening:
A growing number of lawmakers want to stop the upcoming pay cut. And Congress is considering the Physician Shortage Elimination Act, which would spend millions to provide more scholarships for medical students and expand residency training programs throughout the country.
Related posts:
- The primary care shortage in Maryland
- How the primary care doctor shortage threatens Obama’s health reform plan
- Universal health care and the physician shortage
- Improve primary care access before guaranteeing universal health coverage, my address at the National Press Club
- Why nurse practitioners and physician assistants will not solve the primary care shortage
- How to fix the primary care shortage
- Primary care shortage
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It’s unlikely they’ll be willing to spend the money it would require to significantly increase payment to generalist physicians. That’d be the most effective way to retain and recruit new generalists. More med school scholarships and more residencies won’t do squat if students wisely shun generalist careers.
Linking scholarships to generalist commitments is a flawed solution which will produce little stability as it would sentence those docs to low pay, overloaded jobs until they could flee to a specialist career.
Preventing the impending cut is just a drop in the bucket when contemplating how to keep our primary care docs busy, useful and reasonably well compensated.
The theory behind their practice methodology needs to change. They should not fight the move to redi clinics in pharmacies…they should embrace it as it offloads simple tasks that can be repeated all day long by extenders following simple treatment schemes or algorithms.
Primary care docs must embrace the Quaterback theory which has been bantered about for a while now.
Primary Care physicians should provide the clinical leadership, practice population oversight, care coordination, and overall direction for care teams The resulting reimbursement should then be based on the results of their care coordination abilities and the proof of their efforts. The payors and Mcare are beginning to consider how to reimburse these care coordinators and I think we should support this wholeheartedly. Fighting to prevent another medicare cut is just an annnual right of passage to continuing practice medicine in its current dysfunctional form.
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