Doctor Shortage

Joseph Stubbs, president of the American College of Physicians — the second-largest doctors’ group in the country — confirms that “the supply of doctors just won’t be there” for the 30 million new patients President Barack Obama wants to cover. Noting that the doctor shortage is “already a catastrophic crisis,” Stubbs noted that underserved areas in the U.S. currently need almost 17,000 new primary care physicians even before Obama’s proposals are enacted.

In the meantime, according to Bloomberg News, a 2009 survey by Merritt Hawkins & Associates, a recruiting and research firm in Irving, Texas, found that “the average waiting time to see a family-medicine doctor in Boston … is 63 days, the most among the 15 cities” surveyed. By comparison, in Miami, it was only seven days. The study noted that Boston’s longer wait was “driven in part by the healthcare reform initiative” passed in 2006 in Massachusetts, upon which the Obama program is modeled. Bloomberg reported that “as many as half of doctors in the state have closed their practices to new patients, forcing many of the newly insured to turn to emergency rooms for care.”

are you saying that male doctors aren't doing the same thing?...

because they are....

there's a growing trend to have hospitalists see patients admitted to the hospital....their own private care doctors don't want the hassle in seeing office and hospital patients, so getting rid of the hospital visits is a boon for them...

where I work, we have very few private doctors come see their own patients....

male doctors want the time off too...

I think you are confusing supply with demand. Demand is when someone has a problem they need treatment for. Supply is when there is a doctor who can do the work. You don’t increase supply by increasing the need for neurosurgery. That increases demand. The way to increase supply is to increase the number of doctors.

Our government for some reason thinks that the supply and demand will not balance unless some government bureaucrat makes it balance, so they are constantly adjusting supply by adopting policies designed to reduce (or increase) the number of doctors. For the last 60 years, they’ve always aimed to reduce the number of doctors, not increase them, and that is the source of our shortage for the most part, though I admit that the tort law is also a big part of the problem. A large part of the stress doctors have is that they are overworked because there are not enough of them, and they are expected to spend virtually no time on each patient because there aren’t enough of them.

At the same time, the government has policies that are designed to adjust demand for healthcare. They’ve got subsidies to encourage people to buy more healthcare. They’ve got bureaucrats who decide when people have been getting too much healthcare. Frankly, how much people spend on healthcare is none of their business, though.

In a free market, patients decide how much they are going to spend on healthcare, and what services they are going to obtain, with the advice of their doctors. Doctors decide whether they are willing to work for the price that the patient is willing to pay. When those two things coincide, you have a procedure.

That doesn’t bear much similarity to reality because we don’t have a free market in this area. Despite the fact that it is government that has been manipulating both supply and demand for decades, they blame the mess they’ve created on the “free market.” Their ain’t no free market in this case. The mess we’ve got was caused by government. And you’re not going to fix that problem with more government.

I do think that they could alleviate the problem to some degree by tort reform, but the biggest thing they could do is increase the number of medical schools and the capacity of existing medical schools. Our medical education system does not have the capacity to produce the number of doctors we need. You could build a whole lot of medical schools for a tiny fraction of a percent of what Pelosi wants to spend on socialized medicine.

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