While most people consider the responsibilities of adulthood to include a 40-hour work week, meeting car insurance payments, grocery shopping, and so on, few consider finding a physician to replace their pediatrician a priority adults typically struggle with.
Yet ever since former President Barack Obama’s health care law, Obamacare, let young adults stay on their parents’ health insurance until they’re 26, a growing number have kept their childhood pediatrician throughout their extra years of coverage, despite the fact that pediatricians specialize in the medical care of people under 21. As a result, a growing number of pediatricians are now finding themselves treating patients well into adulthood years. This might sound innocuous enough, yet it actually has serious consequences.
And the problem is only getting worse.
A large number of pediatric practices have reported an increase in the average age of patients seen in their practice over the last decade. For example, David Bell, medical director of the family planning program at a hospital in Manhattan, remarked that when he began working there in the late 1990s, he saw patients up to age 24. After older patients gradually began drifting in he “pushed it up to 27, then 30, and now 35,” he noted, adding, “I’m kind of sticking to 35.”
While there is no actual law concerning what specific age an individual should transition from a pediatrician to seeing a physician focused on adults, it is generally considered to be somewhere between the time an individual graduates from high school and 21 years of age.
In 1969, recognizing that many high school students were choosing to postpone a job and choosing to attend college instead, the American Academy of Pediatrics raised the official recommended age to switch to an adult doctor from 18 to 21. In 2011, however, the AAP released an updated policy statement that discouraged the establishment of specific age limits on pediatric and adult care, instead encouraging health care providers to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.
While many pediatricians are content with seeing patients throughout their college years into their early twenties, the increased reliance on child health providers can create certain challenges for many medical practices that may not be used to seeing so many adults.
For one, having more patients who rely on a pediatrician means more appointments for that doctor, which can increase the waiting time period to get an appointment, possibly depriving in-need children of care if the doctor is no longer able to accept new patients under their current workload.
Recent policy AAP statements have made clear that shortages of both pediatric primary care doctors and specialty providers are particularly apparent in less-populated, rural areas, which makes it harder for patients in need of medical care to seek treatment. These issues are exacerbated when adults seek out child health care providers, simply because they are too lazy or uniformed to seek an adult specialist.
John Patrick (@john_pat_rick) is a graduate of Canisius College and Georgia Southern University. He interned for Red Alert Politics during the summer of 2012 and has continued to contribute to the the Washington Examiner regularly.
