http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ma...50498142331&action=collapse_widget&id=8589671
"Overwhelmingly, the greatest shortages of doctors today are primary care physicians and other generalists. According to a recent survey sponsored by the independent congressional agency MedPAC, finding a primary care doctor is highly problematic even for Americans with good health insurance. Among fully insured Americans over the age of fifty who went looking for a primary care doctor last year, fully one out of seven report it was a “big problem.” This is double the percent who report having trouble finding a specialist. Even in affluent parts of the country, finding a primary care doctor who is still taking new patients can require as much scheming as getting your three-year-old into Montessori. In rural and poor inner-city areas, it’s often well nigh impossible. Nearly sixty million Americans—almost one out of five—live in regions or neighborhoods designated by the federal government as primary care shortage areas."
"Part of the problem is that, due largely to the political power of specialists, the reimbursement rates paid by Medicare and private insurance are set far higher for specialists than for primary care doctors (for more, see “What the RUC?”). But our system for training doctors is also deeply at fault, with the country’s most elite and deeply subsidized teaching hospitals being by far the worst offenders. In the tables below, we show the nation’s largest residency programs ranked according to the percentage of primary care doctors they produce."
It is a fact that the greatest need is primary care physicians.
The AMA has not really opened the floodgates of medical schools: The rate of increase of medical schools has barely kept up with population rises. there have been only 13 new (allopathic) medical school opened in the US since 2002. That's about a 10% rise. There have been 15-17000 new med graduates, again 10%. these numbers are on par with population growth over that time.
