Have you heard about the doctor shortage? Most of us brush it aside, knowing we have all the doctors we need. But the reality is that we currently have about 15,000 fewer doctors to treat the population’s medical needs than we should, according to Sarah Kliff.
The Association of American Medical Colleges expects that number to soar to 63,000 as soon as 2015, according to Kliff, with the Affordable Care Act and its extension of health insurance to more people, and double by 2025.
Health experts, including many who support the law, say there is little that the government or the medical profession will be able to do to close the gap by 2014, when the law begins extending coverage to about 30 million Americans, Annie Lowrey and Robert Pear noted in The New York Times.
The 2010 Affordable Care Act’s insurance expansion takes effect at a time when the U.S. has 15,230 fewer primary-care doctors than it needs, according to an Aug. 28 assessment by the Department of Health and Human Services, as Alex Wayne wrote.
But Kliff was more hopeful. She wrote in her article that the residency program to train doctors “has, for decades, largely been financed by Medicare.” But back in 1997, when Medicare costs got completely out of hand, Congress passed the Balanced Budget Amendment, and among its many provisions to control Medicare cost growth, it included a limit on how many residencies it would pay for.
“That residency cap remains in place right now,” Kliff revealed. “It is a lot of the explanation for why we have too few doctors.”
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Not unexpectedly, medical schools aren’t expanding because the number of applicants for residencies already exceeds the available positions, according to the National Resident Matching Program, a 60-year-old Washington-based not-for-profit that oversees the program, according to Kliff.
And populations are growing faster than doctors can be trained.
But here’s the good news. Kliff explained that Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Penn.) and Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) are co-sponsoring legislation that would eliminate this cap to make more jobs available for the doctors streaming out of schools.
It’s going to cost money. Over nine billion dollars, Kliff tabulated – not a huge sum of money “when you think of Medicare’s overall budget – $524.6 billion – but in Washington, it’s not easy money to come by.”
Sadly, the legislation from Schwartz and Shock does not yet have a single additional co-sponsor, she concluded.
Edited by
Braden Becker
