An article in the on-line publication The Week ,“Is America Running Out of Doctors?” serves to echo the specter of doctor shortages under Obamacare, referencing other articles including the NYT article we critiqued in our previous post. Here is what they list as “modest provisions” within Obamacare to solve the problem, the problem that increased government regulations created in the first place and the prospect for more regulations exacerbates. We think they are reflective of the hubris of Obamacare. Only the gargantuan ego of a managing class promoting government control and their own sinecures as regulators causes the failure to see that they are the primary problem.
What can we do about it?
ObamaCare contains modest provisions increasing Medicaid primary-care payments and incentives for medical students to become primary-care physicians. The number of primary-care residencies climbed 20 percent between 2009 and 2011, but it’s still not enough. Communities have been encouraged to create more walk-in clinics, and to allow more nurses to provide primary care. In addition, the U.S. could alter its immigration policies to attract doctors from overseas, “which should be very easy to do since doctors in the U.S. earn on average about twice as much as their comparably trained counterparts in Western Europe and Canada,” says Dean Baker at Business Insider.
So the incentives for medical school students to become primary care physicians have been insufficient. Why — because it is not just about financing med school. Longer term prospects for the primary physician role are still anemic by comparison to other career avenues. Perhaps being part of a system analogous to the grey building aura of the Social Security Administration or the Department of Motor Vehicles is not so attractive even if the gooberment helps finance your schooling.
The article refers to “more walk-in clinics” . . . but how do more doctor’s offices increase doctors, the stated problem? Adding responsibilities to nurses as a solution . . . well they better have more training . . . more insurance . . . and be compensated for increased liability all of which are not factors that lend themselves to lowering costs.
The last suggested solution to doctor shortages in the article, increased immigration of physicians, actually is an indictment of socialized medicine, and the long term fruitlessness of the suggestion. The justification for the idea, that “doctors in the U.S. earn on average about twice as much as their comparably trained counterparts in Western Europe and Canada . . .” confirms that doctors can be induced to leave countries with socialized medicine, essentially what Obamacare is, and that in those western countries with socialized medicine, doctors are paid less than in a more market oriented system.
So the real implications are that government controlled (market oblivious but dictated anyway) costs of health care causes doctors to flee such locals. The prospects of the US as a desirable destination for health care recipients and providers diminishes with the “success” of Obamacare.
European and Canadian doctors might as well stay put. Doctors from India might as well stay put as well . . . and just open clinics in their own country catering to Americans and enjoy the lower costs of living and family access. RM
