Ten years ago, I wrote an essay on the primary care shortage. I argued that more money and better working conditions would help decrease the shortage. Unfortunately, things have worsened over the last decade. The AAMC now predicts a shortage of between about 15,000 and 50,000 primary care doctors in 2030.
The gap between generalists’ and specialists’ incomes is still huge. The average family doctor earns about half …
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Should doctors give up on primary care?
America faces a serious shortage of primary care doctors. The reasons are not hard to understand.
Lower income is the most important factor. Adult primary care doctors (general internal medicine physicians and family medicine physicians) earn on average $100,000 or so less per year than specialists do. Our income is much greater than that of the average American, and so many people have little sympathy here. But almost all people prefer …
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More than lip service is needed to fix the primary care shortage
The primary care physician (PCP) shortage has attracted a lot of attention recently, and for good reason. Individual Americans are concerned that they will not have timely access to needed medical care, and policy makers are concerned that our specialist-heavy medical system is failing, giving us expensive but disjointed, poor quality care. Many experts rightly think that a robust primary care system would give us better health care for …
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How to fix the primary care shortage
