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.