US lacks of primary care physicians

In a editorial published in August 31, 2006 in the New England Journal of Medicine the statement was made that US lacks of primary care physicians and the graphic reproduced below with the courtesy of the author gave the reason why: the work is no more attractive for students.  In a previous post we had seen that the reduction of  staff of primary care physicians leads them to refuse appointments for new patients. This matter of fact provokes the anger of the federal administration. This issue is also encountered more and more in France.

Will the new pay for performance measures implemented in France be attractive or repulsive for the new generations?

Indeed the future national primary care payment policy, whatever it will be, will have to take into account these demographic data.

Primary cares Doctors are anonymously tested by Obama’s administration.

The aim of this testing is to evaluate the impact on primary care physicians of the increasing number of new patients insured by government health program induced by the Affordable Care Act. Fortunately results of the survey will be aggregated but health care practitioners express concerns about the method. “Everybody with a brain knows we do not have enough doctors” said one of them to the New York Times journalist. In France we also express concerns about alleged rejection of Universal Health Coverage (CMU) patients by some primary care practitioners or specialists. But I never heard of such a “secret shopper call” methodology to test the reality of the issue.