[neverdem]

It's a little old, but if we get Obamacare, I expect early retirements as soon as possible. I would also expect more foreign medical graduates, nurse practitioners and physician assistants as the majority of primary care providers in the USA.

[johniegrad]

I would also expect more foreign medical graduates, nurse practitioners and physician assistants as the majority of primary care providers in the USA.

As a 20+ year physician in a large multispecialty group, I can tell you that we are seeing these things already.

[Clioman]

Yeah, life’s pretty miserable for a doctor...but they’ll keep trundling their paychecks to the bank.

[nmh]

Wait till “universal Health care” arrives!

The employer will be the government. The government will determine what you can earn and redistribute the rest. It's also starting to be outsourced. For example, MRI's can easily be read in India. The time change is perfect. They read it over there and email the analysis back. They are U.S. trained so you can't complain about that. They're happy to learn HERE and then go home and live like kings and queens.

[LongTimeMILurker]

Look for that 22% that wouldn’t go into medicine at all to jump to over 50% with national health care. Any transition would be a disaster for years, with HUGE shortages of doctors. Of course, the media would tell us everything was fine and better than private health care. Those able to leave would leave the profession, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was immediately 25% or more of the physicians. And that would include that better paying specialties that no longer would be better paid.

[Brilliant]

This healthcare shortage was engineered by liberals who needed an excuse to socialize the healthcare system.

[gusopol3]

cardiologists, radiologists and other medical specialists commonly earn $300,000 or more

this is about as much as a Hospital community outreach administrator makes in Chicago (guess who?)

[Mamzelle]

Back in the eighties and nineties (and under the influence of Hillarycare--which carried alot of weight though never became legislation), new MDs were encouraged to go into primary care rather than specialties. Family Practice residency programs were new and carried with them the romantic ideology of Marcus Welby who got to do everything from OBgyn to complicated internal medicine.

Then lawsuit mania hit, and they didn't get to have the fun of delivering babies anymore. "Urgent care" clinics opened up. The intimacy of FPs and their patients deteriorated through the defensiveness of the doctors who no longer trust their patients.

Primary care physicians are supplanted by the rise in PAs and NPs. A PA with lots of experience is actually more desirable to a hospital or outpatient clinic than an MD fresh out of school.

Also, talented diagnosticians in primary care devote hours of time to analysis and protocols only to watch the real $$ go to the specialist or surgeon who does the next stage of the patient care. Procedures are highly compensated--excellent diagnoses are not. Resentment of this is natural--human nature. Brains verses brawn sort of thing.

The shortage of specialists is more acute than FPs. The most pressing is the lack of trauma surgeons. ERs across the country are welcoming the downgrading of their Trauma levels.

Litigiouness and the knee-jerk resentment by the public (the attitude that somehow a doc comes by his MD through privilege rather than hard work) is going to create a doc shortage for boomers because the boomer docs are longing for retirement and are preparing well for it.

[Polybius]

I expect early retirements as soon as possible. I would also expect more foreign medical graduates, nurse practitioners and physician assistants as the majority of primary care providers in the USA.

The problem is that, for many years, medical schools pushed primary care to the point that it was Politically Incorrect to choose specialty training.

As a result, there is now a glut of primary care M.D.'s, nurse practitioners and physician assistants and a shortage of specialists.

In addition, many primary care physicians opted for clinic practices with one day off during the week and with "Hospitalists" taking care of their patients if they need hospital admission. In short, they made themselves interchangeable with outpatient clinic nurse practitioners and outpatient clinic physician assistants.

So, with the Laws of Supply and Demand being what they are, specialists are now swamped with work but very well paid while primary care physicians are treated as somebody that can easily be replaced by a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant and paid accordingly.

[krb]

while more than 50 percent consider themselves "second class citizens" compared to surgical and diagnostic specialists.

Every doctor who goes through rotations in med school should have figured that one out early.

[wintertime]

ping

[JoeGar]

Medicare and insurance reimbursements to primary care physicians are pitiful. On the other hand, my dermatologist gets a fistful of cash every time he squirts freezing liquid on a skin spot.

[GOPJ]

Doctors are poor little rich boys - 60% of them might wish they'd chosen a different field - and about 80% of their patients would agree.

The medical system isn't working - not for liberals, not for conservatives, not for doctors, not for patients . If it weren't for insurance companies, no one would win in the medical system. ( And doctors and patients together can't stand the insurance companies... but at least they love themselves... which is really sick.)

[WildcatClan]

I am somewhat surprised at some of what I have read on this thread. Understand, no one, almost without exception, decides to be a Physician because of greed, avarice or a healthy bank account.

There are 4 years of college (pre-med) and then 4 years of Med School. You then go on to make around 40-50k a year in a residency for at least three more years where you are little more than an indentured servant, with little or no life. Although you might only be in the residency for 3 years, before you leave, you will have worked enough hours for 6 years.

You enter medicine, because you want to help sick people and have a compassion for them and their suffering. It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with money because, quite frankly, there is no amount of money worth being exposed to the obscenity of human death and suffering and feeling powerless sometimes to help. There is no amount of money worth having very little life of your own. Money, what money? A fairly seasoned private plumber can equal or better a GP’s salary. There are always exceptions, but Physicians are slowly going the way of the Physician in the former USSR, right here in America. Anyone recall how Russian doctors would come here and work as dishwashers in America?

Physicians do the best they can with what they have, within the system they have to work. Just like you, they must make a living and they certainly do not deserve some of the demonization I have seen on this thread.

[Stoat]

Several people on this thread have mentioned and / or drawn comparisons to the NHS in the UK, and so I thought that it may be of interest to see this FR thread from April of last year:

Great Britain Morale terrible among doctors (poll of NHS Docs69% wouldn't recommend MD career)

In addition to the article, there are a number of great posts and links there, some provided by Daffynition

[socialismisinsidious]

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