Some Experts Dispute Claims Of Looming Doctor Shortage

You hear it so often it’s almost a cliché: The nation is facing a serious shortage of doctors, particularly doctors who practice primary care, in the coming years.

But is that really the case?

Many medical groups, led by the Association of American Medical Colleges, say there’s little doubt. “We think the shortage is going to be close to 130,000 in the next 10 to 12 years,” says Atul Grover, the group’s chief public policy officer.

But others, particularly health care economists, are less convinced. “Concerns that the nation faces a looming physician shortage, particularly in primary care specialties, are common,” wrote an expert panel of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in a report on the financing of graduate medical education in July. “The committee did not find credible evidence to support such claims.”

Gail Wilensky, a health economist and co-chair of the IOM panel, says previous predictions of impending shortages “haven’t even been directionally correct sometimes. Which is we thought we were going into a surplus and we ended up in a shortage, or vice versa.”

Those warning of a shortage have a strong case. Not only are millions of Americans gaining coverage through the Affordable Care Act, but 10,000 baby boomers are becoming eligible for Medicare every day. And older people tend to have more medical needs.

“We know essentially with the doubling of the population over the age of 65 over the course of a couple of decades, they’re driving the demand for services,” says Grover.

In addition to a numerical shortage, there’s also a mismatch between what kind of doctors the nation is producing and the kind of doctors it needs, says Andrew Bazemore, a family physician with the Robert Graham Center, an independent project of the American Academy of Family Physicians.

“We do a lot of our training in the northeastern part of our country, and it’s not surprising that the largest ratio of physicians and other providers, in general, also appear in those areas,” says Bazemore. “We have shown again and again that where you train matters an awful lot to where you practice.” That ends up resulting in an oversupply in urban centers in the Northeast and an undersupply elsewhere.

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