Trends In The Physician Workforce, 1980-2000 (original) (raw)

The Physician Workforce and Financing of Graduate Medical Education

Annals of Internal Medicine, 1998

How well the supply of physicians in the United States matches national, state, and local health care needs has profound implications for public policy. Surpluses or shortages of physicians among specialties and the geographic distribution of physicians affect the access, quality, and cost of health care throughout the United States. The U.S. government and state governments traditionally have striven to ensure that the public receives medical services of the highest quality, that medical services are safe and effective, and that providers of medical services have the requisite education, training, and skills. It has also been public policy to encourage and sustain the institutions and resources that are essential for medical education and research and to help ensure that opportunities for medical careers are open to the best qualified applicants. However, the supply of physicians has continued to increase much faster than the U.S. population for more than 20 years, and market force...

Physician Workforce Projections in an Era of Health Care Reform

Annual Review of Medicine, 2012

In 2020, the United States may face shortages of 45,400 primary care physicians and 46,100 medical specialists-a total of 91,500 too few doctors. Unfortunately, health workforce shortages like these are being advanced as cause for repealing or "defunding" the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The extension of health insurance coverage to millions of Americans is a critical first step toward a healthier America. It would be a national failure to leave millions of Americans without health insurance coverage because they will generate additional demand. Rather, the solution is to find ways to meet that demand. Workforce projections utilizing real data and carefully formulated assumptions to assess how and why supply and demand change over time can greatly assist policy makers in finding those solutions. With implementation of the ACA under way, it is time to understand what lessons such projections can teach, and to begin to heed those lessons.

Rethinking the shortage of primary care physicians

Journal of the American Academy of Physician Assistants, 2018

For decades, public concerns about a shortage of physicians led federal and state policy makers to pursue policies to increase the number of medical graduates. In response, the number of medical schools increased dramatically over the past decade. By 2016, the United States produced more new physicians than ever before. Expanding medical school enrollments, however, were not matched by a corresponding increase in the number of physicians choosing primary care. To date, few policy makers questioned the conventional wisdom that more is better when it comes to the supply of primary care physicians. Instead, policy makers should consider alternative approaches to increase access to patientcentered primary care.