With a majority of Baby Boomers entering Medicare age, doctors who specialize in treating the elderly are become scarce.
It’s a demanding field, with physicians forced to deal with multiple, complex issues within a 15-minute time span. For their trouble, they are paid disproportionally low when compared to proceduralists.
Surgeon Atul Gawande asks, “is the time I spend as a surgeon excising a patient’s cancer worth 10 times more than the time the primary care doctor spent finding the cancer in the first place?”
No it’s not. And this has to change if Medicare has any hope of staying out of bankruptcy.
