Island Med Student

As I alluded to in my recent post, I have a health insurance plan provided by my medical school, but have been unable to find a primary care physician. It seems that whenever I make calls to find one, they are either not accepting new patients, or the first available appointment is so far into the future that I can’t even guarantee that I’ll be able to make it. I live in New York City, so can you imagine what it would be like if I lived in a small town somewhere in rural America?

The unfortunate consequence of this situation became even more real to me a few weeks ago when I became sick and needed to see a doctor. Since I was unable to locate one, I ended up going to the Emergency Department of the hospital where I’m currently rotating. You can imagine how silly I felt sitting in the waiting room for many hours, clogging up the system, wasting the doctor’s time, when all I really needed was for someone to take a quick listen to my lungs, check out my throat, and write me a prescription for some antibiotics.

At least I was lucky enough to have access to a doctor at all. Not everyone is always this lucky. So many people out there don’t even have health insurance at all. What is going on?!

I’m sure most of the readers of this blog already have a good idea of how broken the U.S. healthcare system is. I could rant for many hours on this topic. However, I’m just going to focus on one specific part of the problem right now.

A survey of physicians recently published by the Physicians’ Foundation found that:

- 78% believe there is a shortage of primary care doctors in the U.S.
- 49% said that over the next three years they plan to reduce the number of patients they see or stop practicing entirely
- 94% said the time they devote to non-clinical paperwork in the last three years has increased, and 63% said that paperwork has caused them to spend less time per patient
- 82% said their practices would be “unsustainable” if proposed cuts to Medicare reimbursements were made
- 60% would not recommend medicine as a career to young people

Now, the results of this study must be taken with a grain of salt, as there was only a 4% response rate, and there is obviously some self-selection bias at play. However, I don’t think anyone would disagree that “the proof is in the pudding.” I was unable to find a primary care physician in New York City, one of the largest cities in America, in a reasonable amount of time. There is something seriously wrong with the system, and with the future of primary care in this country.

I encourage you to read some of the actual responses from physicians at the end of the report. It was pretty eye opening for me, and it might just make you want to get out of your chair, go to the window, and scream, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”

I found this response to be particularly saddening:

“I put everything I have into treating my patients. I’m about to lose my family for nothing. Just because I try to take good care of my patients ““ but it’s just too much work and nothing in return. My children have suffered because of time without their dad.”

What are we to do?

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