If you want to know why we’re going to have a major shortage of primary care physicians in the future, all you have to do is look at what’s happened to the income of family doctors over the past decade. Adjusted for inflation, they’ve dropped by 10%. The average primary doctor is the United States now earns $120,000 a year. Now, before you go ahead and claim that is still a quite a bit of money, you need to compare it to what has happened to other professions during the same time.
Doctors’ earnings are losing ground, and a steeper relative decline among primary-care physicians may lead to a shortage unless certain insurance reimbursement rates rise, according to a new study.
Between 1995 and 2003, physicians’ net income fell about 7% after adjusting for inflation, and primary-care doctors saw their real wages drop more than 10% in that time, according to a report from the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC,) a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.
Physicians’ professional counterparts such as lawyers and engineers saw a 7% inflation-adjusted gain over those eight years. (emphasis mine)
Flat or declining Medicare reimbursements and payments from private health insurers are a major contributor to lower physician earnings, the report said. Falling take-home pay may explain why fewer doctors are willing to perform charity care or volunteer to serve on hospital committees.While physicians aren’t hurting for money – their net income was $203,000 on average in 2003 – the income slide is cause for concern, experts said. Financial disincentives may threaten the supply of primary-care doctors, family physicians, general internists and pediatricians, as medical students with large debt loads are lured to more lucrative specialties.Primary care has always been the lowest paid specialty, but the income difference has widened, HSC President Paul Ginsburg said. After adjusting for inflation, primary-care doctors earned $121,262 in 2003 compared with $135,036 in 1995, the report found.“This could point to a potential shortage in primary care [doctors] because those specialties have become a lot less attractive relative to other specialties than they have been in the past because income gaps are growing,” Ginsburg said.
Note that the study stops at 2003. But, physician reimbursement has dropped in the past three years, so the decline in primary care doctors incomes is even worse than the aticle actually states. Relative to the amount of training a family doctor has (four years of college, four of medical school, and a three year residency), a family doctors income is unaccepatably low.
Now, do you suppose that Medicare, Medicaid, the HMOs and private insurance plans will increase reimbursement to primary care docs to avert the looming shortage? Fat chance. Not with the massive unfunded laibility in the Medicare program. And, since HMOs and private insurers follow the lead of Medicare, I wouldn’t expect to see an increase in reimbursement from them either.
But, don’t worry. The government is planning on making it easier for foreign physicians to come to the US and practice, which should help ameliorate the shortage. Just make sure you learn to speak Urdu so that you’ll be able to converse with your doc, or you may be out of luck.
