With nearly 80 million Baby Boomers approaching retirement age, America is facing a critical crisis. There simply aren’t enough doctors to care for the aging population.
Currently, the U.S. produces about 25,000 doctors a year. To keep up with the demographic trends, we’ll need between 3,000 and 10,000 more per year. Making matters worse is how long it takes to train a physician — an entire decade — which means that by the year 2020, the U.S. will face a shortage of as many as 200,000 doctors, according to a recent report in USA Today.
Twenty years ago, the U.S. had 500,000 physicians. But then the industry made several mistakes.
At that time, the Journal of the American Medical Association predicted a glut of physicians: By 2000, it warned, there would be 165,000 more doctors than the nation would need.
The Council on Graduate Medical Education, or COGME, which was created by Congress to recommend the ideal number of doctors, worked to limit the number of new physicians. Since Congress determines how many doctors are trained each year — through deciding how much money to grant for medical residency training — the U.S. government effectively kept the supply from growing beyond the 100,000 a year that it funds through Medicare, the Veterans Administration, and Medicaid.
And because of the anticipated surplus of doctors, the nation stopped opening medical schools in the 1980s.
Those decisions turned out to be major miscalculations. COGME, which has insisted for the past two decades that the nation has too many doctors, has now changed its position. As it announced, “It now appears that those predictions may be in error.” It is calling for a 15 percent increase in the number of doctors by 2015.
In fact, the nation now has 800,000 doctors, and that won’t be enough when the current generation of physicians reaches retirement age.
What many in the medical industry misunderstood was that advances in technology would not reduce the demand for doctors; instead, the technology has actually increased the demand.
For example, new procedures for treating victims of heart disease can prolong patients’ lives. As a result, there are more survivors of heart attacks, and those survivors are also living longer, which requires more...
