Paying primary care doctors more will not solve the shortage

One of the issues that politicians face is the shortage of primary care doctors. If universal care is enacted the shortage will intensify greatly. Paying primay care doctors more more is magnanimous but shortsighted and shows how confused educators are as to why there is a shortage in the first place.

Here is copy of letter I sent to New LONDON DAY



The New London Day
April 27, 2009

In the April 27 article “Doctor Shortage Raises Worries” suggested that increasing primary care doctors' compensation will attract more of them and lessen the shortage. Ironically, as pointed out by Dr. Thomas H. Lee in the Dec.18, 2008 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, when payments to primary care doctors were increased, they actually saw fewer patients!

The move to get more students into primary care has to start in the medical schools and their admissions process. For decades the trend of medical education has been towards specialization. Some of the advantages of this approach include improved ways of treating diabetes and serious infections and life-saving cardiac bypass surgery.

But medical schools have neglected primary care. By favoring students with strong aptitudes for science that suited them for careers in research or in a specialty, primary care dwindled and continues to dwindle.

One way to solve the primary care shortage would be for colleges and medical schools to design special primary care programs that turn out more primary care doctors in a shorter time span than customary. Such programs could produce competent primary care doctors in seven or eight years instead of the usual eleven. Medical educators will not accept this easily but unless they turn more primacy care doctors quicker and with more practical training, the only other answer to the shortage is to recruit nurse practitioners and physician assistants to do the job.

Ed Volpintesta MD