This is exactly what is happening in MA as a result of Obamacare. The age of the General Practitioner are going the way of the horse and buggy.
I was talking to my PCP, a high school friend, the other day. He was saying his practice stopped taking medicare and medicaide several years ago after they just arbitrarily cut his payments. The electronic filing requirements are going to kill them as well. The manpower costs to transfer their files to electronic system is huge.
Its not about being greedy. Its about having to spend more time on paperwork than being a Doctor. He said the area (with about 600,000 people) could stand at least 15-20 PCPs.
I asked why we did not just create clinics with young doctors—pay them a decent wage, but also pay off their college debt and group them for malpractice. That would be cost effective and take the pressure off from the ERs.
It made sense...but thats why no one will do it. Some hospital is going to glom onto that model and it will become a standard. The free market would win overall.
That’s a really good idea. Probably at least 75% of ER visits could be handled by a doc in a box. Another cost-effective solution are observation holding areas for ERs where they can move patients that are waiting on test results that will determine whether they are admitted or treated and sent home. Without such holding areas, ER docs admit these patients to free up ER beds. But, often the patient is discharged from the hospital unit within a few hours, thus wasting a whole lot of resources for nothing.