Increasing primary care shortage predicted for U.S. health care

Nearly half of doctors, most of them in primary care, plan to reduce the number of patients they are seeing or stop practicing entirely within the next three years, according to a  survey released yesterday by The Physicians' Foundation.

Approximately 12,000 physicians responded to the survey, which was mailed to 270,000 primary care physicians and 50,000 non-primary care physicians nationwide.

"Going into this project we generally knew about the shortage of physicians; what we didn't know is how much worse it could get over the next few years," said Lou Goodman, PhD, president of The Physicians' Foundation.

The Physicians’ Foundation was founded in 2003 as part of a class-action lawsuit settlement between physicians and private third-party payers.

Posted at 09:47AM Nov 19, 2008 by Lynn Hofeldt  |  Comments[1]