Posted on 04/25/2008 8:00:06 AM PDT by Brilliant
America's aging citizens are facing a health care workforce too small and unprepared to meet their needs, according to a new report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) titled "Retooling for an Aging America: Building the Health Care Workforce."
The Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the nation's largest organization devoted to aging research, fully supports the publication's call for a labor pool of adequate size and competency to care for a rapidly increasing over-65 population.
"This pivotal report lays out a much-needed strategy for developing a network of health professionals and frontline workers to avert a crisis in quality care for older persons," said GSA President Lisa Gwyther, MSW. "Complex chronic illness is an issue that we all will face with age. The current fragmented system of care desperately requires an increase in better-prepared personnel to sustain itself."
The report was the result of 15 months of research overseen by a committee of 15 health care experts, many of whom are GSA members.
Committee Chair John W. Rowe, MD, a professor of health policy and management at Columbia University and a former GSA president, said America must prepare itself for demographic changes.
"The combination of the aging of the Baby Boom generation and the increase in life expectancy is going to yield a doubling of the numbers of older people," he said. "And it's important to understand that older people themselves account for a disproportionate amount of the utilization of health care resources."
Despite these trends, "the actual number of geriatricians is going down, not up, in the United States," Rowe added.
Marie Bernard, MD, president of The Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (GSA's educational unit), said policymakers must act quickly to address these problems.
"To meet the needs of our aging parents and grandparents, we need to increase the number of geriatric health specialists — both to provide care for those older adults with the most complex issues and to train the rest of the workforce in the common medical problems of old age," Bernard said.
Sponsorship for the IOM project was provided by The John A. Hartford Foundation, The Atlantic Philanthropies, The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Retirement Research Foundation, The California Endowment, The Archstone Foundation, The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, and The Commonwealth Fund.
And yet we have plenty enough lawyers to sue the remaining doctors into malpractice insurance rate-induced insolvency. I, for one, am pleased to know that there will always be a lawyer around should I need a life-saving medical procedure...
“The current fragmented system of care desperately requires an increase in better-prepared personnel to sustain itself.”
In layman’s term - MORE MONEY IS NEEDED!
IMO - Much like the energy shortage, the rice shortage, these are crisis being perpetrated by their own industries, such not build additional refining capacity, not allowing more students into medical schools. The list goes on...
Any self-respecting evolutionist would not view this as anyting other than natural selection in a world full of random chemical reactions. For me, I wonder how many of those 21 million unborn babies aborted over the last 25 years would be practicing or becoming doctors today. Sad.
Don’t worry!...the government will fund classes on how to operate on yourself!
Eventually, the only recourse will be for the government to provide medical education free of charge to prospective students in exchange for a 5 year commitment to government management of personnel resources. They'll treat health care as they do officer training in the military.
Any youngster today who has plans to become a medical doctor would be best served to go into veterinary medicine.
With all due respect to the boomers who deserve my respect. Your generation is the leader in socialist crap programs that have led to the bankruptcy of America in more ways than one. All the generations following have continued down the path you really began en mass.
IMHO, the cost of malpractice insurance and the constant fear of malpractice law suits have ruined the practice of medicine.
Tort reform is badly needed.
As a “bleeding edge boomer” I agree with your comment.
However, in my case, I’ve fought this stuff tooth and nail. A lot of good it did :)
And now, payback is gonna be a bitch like we’ve never seen.
Duct tape.
President Carter’s 1980 budget proposes to prevent an impending over-supply of doctors by completely eliminating funding that has been used by medical schools for nearly a decade to expand their enrollments.
This is the best I can do. I remember Carter asking Universities to not create too many doctors. I’ll do a little more searching.
Check back a little farther, willya? Social Security did not start with the Baby Boomers, nor the National Recovery Act, nor the WPA, etc. Sorry, but it goes back farther than the boomers.
The Constitution hasn't been firing on all cylinders for 150 years, and it is up to all of us to fix it.
That said, I want a doctor who doesn't write "Yo, take all yo pillz, yo!" in the discharge instructions.
Actually, he'd be best advised to become a UPS driver or auto mechanic. There si no future in medicine. Medicare will be bankrupt in another ten years,..
-ccm
Since graduating from med school almost 30 yrs ago, the class size at my alma mater has not changed. The class composition has changed from 5% women to ~50% women. The average length of career (time from start of practice to retirement) for women is on the order of half the length for men. There are all the usual and predictable reasons for this. This has effectively decreased the pool of practicing physicians by about 25%. No sexism here; just statistics.
Exactly. Not just Carter. Clinton did it too, with a GOP Congress. And not just them.
The medical profession has been incrementally restricting growth in the number of doctors for more than 100 years. The problem began to become acute in the 60’s.
The health care establishment hired a bunch of economists to do studies that came to the conclusion that the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to the medical profession so that they could justify additional restrictions on the numbers of doctors. They invented logic that said basically that if you increase the number of doctors, the demand for health care increases because doctors will do all kinds of unnecessary surgery and tests to increase their incomes. They did studies that supposedly proved this. They called it “physician induced demand.”
However, they ignored that there were a lot of other reasons that the demand for health care was increasing at the same time, like the spread of health insurance, the increase of available technologies, the increase in people’s incomes, medicare, etc. It is very difficult to factor out those things, and they were not even trying because they were trying to justify restrictions on the numbers of doctors.
As you can see, though, the price of health care has gone no where but up despite the restrictions they imposed, so it seems pretty obvious that their studies were wrong and the policies they pushed thru backfired. In fact, we are now in a very severe doctor shortage, in every specialty, and even among general practitioners. And that is the number one reason that hospitals have been closing. In order to run a hospital, you’ve got to have doctors. If you don’t, then you’ve got to close your doors.
The net effect is a severe reduction in the supply of health care. No matter how much the government spends on health care, you’re not going to increase the availability of health care unless you increase the number of doctors. All you will do is drive up the price further, just as predicted by the laws of supply and demand.
And guess what? That’s exactly what’s happening.
Of course, there are a lot of politicians in Washington who don’t really want to fix the problem. They just want to use the problem as an excuse to socialize the health care system. They have a vested interest in blocking real efforts toward change. If we increased the number of doctors, that might reduce health care costs, and then they would not have socialized medicine as a political issue to demogogue.
And all of it could be fixed very easily without an increase in the expenditure of public money just by relaxing legal and institutionary restrictions that are designed to restrict the number of doctors. In particular, they could authorize medical schools to increase their enrollment. Currently, the medical profession directly controls the enrollment in medical schools thru their accredidation system.
You’d think that since women are now going into medical school, we’d have twice as many qualified applicants, and they could double their enrollment without sacrificing quality.
That is actually much harder to get into. Super competitive. And the only doctors who make serious money are plastic surgeons, oncologists and radiologists. And all doctors are crippled with massive debts for 10-20 years after med school.
I advise young people so inclined to go into dentistry. Smaller loans. Ease of admissions. And a CASH business with high profit margins. And NO Medicare.
How about a doctor who isn't merely a phamacist? Most MDs today are shills for Big Pharma, with no knowledge or interest in alternative approaches. There are thousands of stupid pediatricians who routinely prescribe anti-biotics for child ear infections--97% of which go away by themselves with no treatment. All that is needed is some mullein ear drops to control the pain. But then how would Pfizer get paid?
Hey, I'd go for that! Or a 'sample passer'?
Heck, I'd be happy with a decent diagnostician instead of someone who uses the antibiotic shotgun to do away with what ails you--or pain killers--no thanks, fis the problem and it will quit hurting. Don't fix it but give me an analgesic and I'll just mess whatever it is up worse. Pain exists for a reason.
I watch some of the shows on TV and it is like science fiction rather than medicine, at least as I have seen medicine from the patient's standpoint.
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