Obama: "We're not producing enough primary care physicians"

A New York Times story this week suggests that the Obama administration understands that a shortage of primary care physicians could undermine health care reform. Family physicians, particularly those in rural and urban areas, know this all too well. Others need look no farther than Massachusetts, where a plan for near-universal coverage has been unfolding over the last three years, to see that without significantly greater numbers of primary care doctors, the expansion of coverage that Obama has championed is likely to drive costs higher.

A study last year predicted a shortage of 35,000 to 44,000 adult care generalists by 2025, and that was before expanded coverage was the realistic possibility it seems today.

Federal officials are considering several proposals for dealing with the growing shortage, according to the New York Times article: increasing enrollment in medical schools and residency training programs, encouraging greater use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants, expanding the National Health Service Corps, and increasing Medicare payments to primary care physicians. If the latter has to be done in a budget-neutral way, at the expense of payment to specialists, look for dysfunction in the house of medicine, or worse. “A civil war among physicians seems inevitable,” blogger KevinMD predicts.

Posted at 10:03AM Apr 30, 2009 by Leigh Ann Backer  |  Comments[1]