The primary care crisis hits home

Concord, NH – about 30 miles from Nashua – is feeling the primary care crisis up close. Some straight talk from this local editorial:

A study of physician recruitment offers by a national health care search firm goes a long way to explaining the primary care shortage. Family practice doctors were offered an average of $145,000 per year, cardiologists $342,000, radiologists $351,000 and orthopedic surgeons $370,000. Doctors several hundred thousand dollars in debt for their education act rationally when they choose to specialize . . .

. . . The disparity in payment rates for general practitioners and specialists must be narrowed. Specialists will have to make less so generalists can make more. Since no doctors are about to reduce their own incomes, lawmakers at the state and federal level should restructure reimbursement rates under Medicare and Medicaid to recognize that preventing a disease and its complications is at least as important as treating it.

Years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars have made Concord a regional health care center, one that is of little value to people who can’t get through its gates.

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