Repeated media articles continue to inform the public that we don’t have enough physicians to handle our health care, and it’s worsening. We have at least 174 accredited medical schools in our nation that are still producing medical doctors and about 22,000 annually from all medical schools who enter a medical practice of some kind.
That must be a satisfactory number because they aren’t building medical schools much anymore. The existing medical schools are not increasing their class sizes by over 1 to 3 percent annually. And suppose you average out the number of physicians practicing medicine today in our nation, disregarding those headed for research or PhDs. In that case, one can guess that about 1,500,000 are still at work practicing medicine in the U.S.
Accounting for the increasing number of physicians leaving clinical medical practice annually resulting from insufficient income is of concern. For some reason, no medical professional organization tracks those numbers for verification. My concern is that the number of these physicians is far higher than any have estimated.
Suppose you don’t know the true number of physicians quitting medical practice. How can anyone even estimate the seriousness of the problem in health care or correct the causes of the problems? Yet the media frequently keeps broadcasting the increasing attrition of physicians as a problem.
I know that physicians’ attrition has evolved exponentially for various reasons:
1. More physicians practice only part-time. When you add the total number of hours that all physicians practice medicine, total patient care is reduced significantly across our nation.
2. Some medical schools are reducing their entrance qualifications. Not good for us when less qualified physicians continue to increase annually. We don’t read anything about that in the papers.
3. Some college students are no longer applying to medical schools. Why? College students are aware of the abuse of private practice physicians nationwide. They are heading to other professions that are more income stable and where less work is required.
4. What do you think the college students are learning about that turns them off regarding becoming physicians?
Many physicians report not having enough income to fund retirement plans and being unable to send their kids to the desired colleges. They can’t keep up with their medical knowledge and skills because they lack enough income to accomplish that.
Medical practice mandates are increasingly used by our government to cause the disintegration of private medical practice purposely. Politicians know that eliminating private medical practice is necessary to control all health care and the medical profession. It also enables the establishment of socialized medicine.
The government plan is working quite well, especially when no one in the medical profession objects loud enough and often enough. Physicians have few to no allies to fight back—employed physicians find it convenient to rationalize their status and could care less.
Burnout is a predator that has exploded in the medical profession, commonly described as “overwork.” Private practice physicians are being forced to recruit and manage far more medical patients daily to earn enough to pay the overhead, staff demanding raises in income, increased paperwork, and, worst of all, often, loss of their families.
When any physician loses their private practice, the only place they can practice is to promptly jump into government-controlled medical facilities and tolerate being told how to practice medicine until retirement. It’s a perfect plan to eliminate independent medical practice—and it is working perfectly.
Starting a new solo medical practice over again often attracts the same outcome again—because they are business ignorant, the process is long and increasingly stressful. At this point, these physicians don’t understand why they lost their medical practice in the first place and, therefore, often end up in the same dilemma later and again.
New medical students are likely to head for the highest-paid medical specialties, whether they are talented in those areas or not, just for the income that is necessary to live a life appropriate for their level of education and the importance of their elite value in medical care that few people ever attain.
The most extraordinary factor affecting every aspect of a physician’s practice throughout this message is the willful defiance of 98 percent of physicians in medical practice today to understand that their maximum accomplishments in the practice of medicine can only be attained because of business education tools that propel incomes beyond their imaginations.
My fourteen years in employed medical practice and many more years in private medical practice have provided me with the essence of successful medical practice, which I love to teach to other physicians who are willing to listen. However, it took me another 15 years before I discovered the core of the problem: I was business ignorant.
I could only learn from my mistakes by spending over ten years following my leaving medical practice and forcing myself to secure a quality business and marketing education from a business and marketing world expert. And that is when I recognized what caused my practice problems. For over ten decades, thousands of other physicians in our nation have suffered from the same problem for the same reason. As health care quality is decreasing, nothing has been done to fix the problem.
The tragedy is that our medical schools deny responsibility for providing a business education for medical students, let alone a digital business education they can learn from over four years in medical school at minimal expense.
Curtis G. Graham is a physician.
