According to a recent survey nearly half of all primary care physicians don’t like their jobs:
(CNN) — Nearly half the respondents in a survey of U.S. primary care physicians said that they would seriously consider getting out of the medical business within the next three years if they had an alternative.
There is no alternative. No other job offers the combination of income and job security that the practice of medicine does. Additionally, no other job offers the prospect of “doing good while doing well”.
The survey, released this week by the Physicians’ Foundation, which promotes better doctor-patient relationships, sought to find the reasons for an identified exodus among family doctors and internists, widely known as the backbone of the health industry.
A U.S. shortage of 35,000 to 40,000 primary care physicians by 2025 was predicted at last week’s American Medical Association annual meeting.
In the survey, the foundation sent questionnaires to more than 270,000 primary care doctors and more than 50,000 specialists nationwide.
Of the 12,000 respondents, 49 percent said they’d consider leaving medicine. Many said they are overwhelmed with their practices, not because they have too many patients, but because there’s too much red tape generated from insurance companies and government agencies.
If physicians are kidding themselves into believing that a single payer system would result in less paperwork, they’re not as smart as I (or they) think they are.
There are lots of reasons for the shortage of primary care physicians: specialties pay more and have greater prestiage. But make no mistake: this is a problem of the medical profession’s own making. If medical schools and hospitals and were as selective and restrictive in the number specialties other than primary care they admitted and educated, there would be no shortage.
The exchange of autonomy for income was a devil’s bargain the practice of medicine made decades ago. It’s far too late now for buyer’s remorse.
Update
By the way have I mentioned lately that universal coverage will only aggravate the shortage of primary care physicians? Adding 20% more patients will not reduce their problems. My solution both to the problem of not enough primary care physicians and the high cost of health care, which, as I’ve pointed out before, is the cause of the rising number of uninsured rather than its effect, is a dramatic increase in the supply of healthcare.
Why wouldn’t it result in less paperwork (and, as has been mentioned about a million times, the administrative costs are lower in Canada than in the US)? Physicians under a single-payer system would only have to fill out one kind of paperwork for the covered treatments.