Oh, the joy! Let's see … we can keep our insurance policy if we want to: Nope. We can keep our doctor if we want to: Nope, too -
This disease can be traced back to 1997, when Congress, anticipating a doctor surplus, included a section in its budget-balancing law that froze the number of Medicare-sponsored residency positions.
But instead of a surplus, a shortage soon developed, and has worsened over the years, now reaching epidemic proportions. The Association of American Medical Colleges Center for Workforce Studies just reported an anticipated shortage of 90,000 doctors of all kinds over the next decade, with half of them being primary care physicians and the other half surgeons and specialists.
The report suggests that Medicare should support at least a "15% increase in GME (Graduate Medical Education) positions, allowing teaching hospitals to prepare another 4,000 physicians a year to meet the needs of 2020 and beyond."
Don't count on this proposed subsidy happening any time soon. Instead, the new health care law, known ironically as the Affordable Care Act, is promoting and extending the kind of low co-pay and low deductible insurance that is easy to overuse, overwhelming doctors further and leading to an upward spiral of health care costs.
Way to go, Barry!
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