GUEST EDITORIAL
By Benjamin Domenech, The Heartland Institute
We’ve documented in the past the concerns among America’s physicians about how they will adapt to a new reality under President Barack Obama’s health care law, particularly considering the need for more than 30,000 primary care physicians by 2015 even under the most optimistic assumptions of the law’s effects. Now comes a new survey from the Physicians’ Foundation that finds six in 10 doctors are considering quitting and more are sharing their pessimism for America’s health care system thanks to the encroachment of government. Top-line answers from the survey include:
- More than 50 percent of physicians will cut back on patients seen, will switch to part-time, switch to concierge medicine, or retire within the next four years.
- 52 percent of physicians have already limited the access of Medicare patients to their practices or are planning to do so.
- 26 percent have already closed their practices to Medicaid patients.
- 62 percent believe Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are unlikely to increase health care quality or decrease costs.
- 59 percent say PPACA has made them less positive about the future of health care in America.
- 57.9 percent would not recommend medicine as a career to their children or other young people.
- More than one-third of physicians would not choose medicine if they had their careers to do over.
- 77 percent are somewhat pessimistic or very pessimistic about the future of the medical profession.
The full survey is available here. It’s obvious the majority of physicians are experiencing the squeezing effects of diminished payments and burdensome regulations. No wonder the field appears less attractive to them now than when they entered it. One doctor surveyed writes:
As a young new doctor, I have only begun to earn a living at age 33. I have school loans equivalent to a first home mortgage and unless I work myself to death seeing volumes of (Medicare) patients (i.e. 25 per day due to pathetic reimbursement for my mental energy), I cannot even send my 4 year old to summer camp and I tell my wife to skip the fresh fruit this week.
Making this field appealing again is key to having a system that can meet the needs of Medicare and Medicaid patients. But instead, we’re headed in the opposite direction.
