I told you so, again.
A story from NPR (via WhiteCoat) validates what medical blogs have been discussing over the past year:
Health care reform in Massachusetts has led to a dramatic increase in the number of people with health insurance. But there’s an unintended consequence: A sudden demand for primary care doctors has outpaced the supply.
Sound familiar? I suppose I can’t be entirely surprised, as most reform plans are conceived and executed without significant physician input.
This is the obvious result of instituting coverage without first ensuring enough primary care supply. Consider the Holyoke Health Center, which “has been inundated with calls from newly insured people seeking a doctor. More than 1,600 people are on its waiting list . . . it takes about four months to get a first appointment.” Or how about the stories that family physician Kate Atkinson tells, where she says that “people [are] crying and begging to come into the practice.”
Keep in mind that Massachusetts has the highest density of primary care doctors per capita in the country. As the Obama administration institutes a plan very similar to Massachusetts, expect this problem to be felt much more acutely nationwide.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
topics: primary care shortage, massachusetts
Related posts:
- Primary care in Massachusetts
- ER visits and health care costs rise in Massachusetts due to lack of primary care access
- Massachusetts primary care
- Primary care shortage and physician recruiters
- Improve primary care access before guaranteeing universal health coverage, my address at the National Press Club
- How the primary care doctor shortage threatens Obama’s health reform plan
- Academia responsible for the primary care shortage?
{ 3 comments }
Obviously, many of thse people are genuinely sick. One can only speculate how many sick people are not getting care in the states that don’t have universal healthcare. The ones who don’t go to doctors, have no medical record of their ailments, and fall off the map as far as epidemiology. So the healthcare establishment has no record of how sick America is. Maybe that is what they want?
Indeed people in the US have been found to hold off until they are very sick – and then they hve to go to an emergency room, and then doctors often have no history and do the wrong thing.
Or whatever they have is often incurable by that stage, or at the very least, costs much more to fix. Perhaps that is one of the reasons our per capita costs are so much higher than other nations, and the people in those countries (with universal healthcare) are far less stressed out. They don’t lose their homes over some curable ailment. The self-employed middle class are the ones who hurt under both the current situation and under Obama’s plan, which focuses on the employed, those in medical groups. Insurance will still be priced by risk and subject to rescission, so many people will either not be able to afford it, or will buy understating illnesses and pay, and then when they get sick, it and the money that may have been already paid out on their behalf, will be taken away from them, retroactively.
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2008/11/where-would-you-rather-have-your.html
And here are cases where they DO have universal healthcare. Their INSURED patients are made to wait for care……to the point where cancers felt curable at the time of diagnosis become incurable at the time of surgery.
Of course, the better off still get access to a higher standard of care.
The UK has socialized their healthcare to the point where the NHS is the third-largest employer on Earth (Chinese army, Indian railway, NHS respectively). Yet they still have two-tiered healthcare.
References in link above.
When you understand the following facts, it’s easy to explain:
If Obama wants more primary care physicians, he should include more loan forgiveness programs in the deal.
1) People who become doctors are generally smarter than the general public.
2) Doctors want to help people, but also want to help their own families, too.
3) Medical school is VERY expensive.
4) Socialized medicine tends to reduce physician pay, but not the cost of medical school.
5) Doctors who specialize earn more than general practitioners.
6) Doctors who make a mistake, or who simply have a patient with a bad outcome, risk losing everything, including their license to practice. Part of the high pay of physicians makes up for that risk.
7) If Obama wants to pay physicians less to cut medical costs, more potential doctors will choose engineering, business, or other more lucrative and less risky careers.
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