Obamacare won't survive coming doctor shortage
Examiner Editorial
June 28, 2009
President Obama's ambitious plan for radically increasing the government's role in the nation's health care system misses one critical detail: There aren't enough primary care physicians in America now and their numbers are declining. That means government won't be able to deliver the expanded health care Obama is promising to millions of uninsured people. With access to primary care already deteriorating in many parts of the country, Obamacare will make it even harder to get a doctor's appointment without a lengthy wait. "The politicians don't talk about who's going to do this extra work," Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and author of the 1993 book "Your Doctor Is Not In," told The Examiner. "Promised coverage is not the same thing as care. All you're getting is a place in the waiting lines."
A survey of 270,000 primary care physicians last November by the Physicians Foundation found that 76 percent described themselves as "overextended or overworked." As a result, 30 percent plan to see fewer patients or scale back to part-time, 13 percent will look for a job that does not involve patient care, and 11 percent plan to retire. Since a third of all Medicare patients already have trouble finding a doctor to treat them, under Obamacare those waiting lines will be very, very long indeed.
And with the vast majority of medical students opting to enter more lucrative specialties, the U.S. will be short 124,400 front-line physicians by 2025, according to the Association of Medical Colleges. That doesn't include the additional 15,585 primary care providers that will needed under Obamacare. Sick people will have to wait months or even years for an appointment and emergency rooms will be jammed as government-subsidized demand puts even more pressure on the dwindling number of primary care providers, Dr. Orient says. Foreign-trained doctors and nurse practitioners will have be called in to act as the primary gatekeepers in Obama's supposedly new and improved health care system.
When Massachusetts mandated health insurance for all its residents, visits to the state's emergency rooms jumped 7 percent in two years because many people did not have access to a primary care physician and some patients are being forced to endure "group doctor visits" instead of one-on-one care. How can Obamacare work if there's not enough primary care physicians in the system now? "It won't work," Dr. Orient predicts. "It's going to be a disaster."
A disaster that's entirely preventable, we might add, if Congress can conjure up the courage to say "No" to this audacious power grab.
!
