Medical school is getting more expensive and insurance companies and Medicare/Medicaid are getting harder and harder to deal with. No surprise then that according a new survey, fewer graduates of medical school are choosing primary care as their field:
Only 2 percent of graduating medical students say they plan to work in primary care internal medicine, raising worries about a looming shortage of the first-stop doctors who used to be the backbone of the American medical system.
The results of a new survey being published Wednesday suggest more medical students, many of them saddled with debt, are opting for more lucrative specialties.
How bad is the shortage? The Associate Press story goes on to estimate that there is a shortfall of about 2,600 primary care doctors in the US. The gap is being filled by doctors trained abroad:
A separate study in JAMA suggests graduates from international medical schools are filling the primary care gap.
About 2,600 fewer U.S. doctors were training in primary care specialties _ including pediatrics, family medicine and internal medicine _ in 2007 compared with 2002. In the same span, the number of foreign graduates pursuing those careers rose by nearly 3,300.
“Primary care is holding steady but only because of international medical school graduates,” said Edward Salsberg of the Association of American Medical Colleges, a co-author of the study. “And holding steady in numbers is probably not sufficient when the population is growing and aging.”
The reality is that US healthcare is already globalized. This should make it easy to demystify the idea of traveling abroad for surgery. When you walk into an American hospital as a patient, chances are your X-Rays and other lab results are being interpreted by technicians in places like India, at least one or your doctors received their degree from a foreign medical school and a large percentage of the nurses and other medical professionals attending you were born and trained abroad.
Tags: doctor shortage, globalized healthcare, importing doctors
