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Since the passage of the health-care law in March, much has been said about the coming swarm of millions of retiring baby boomers, and the strain they will put on the nation's health-care system. That's only half the problem. Overlooked in the conversation is a particular group of boomers: doctors and nurses who are itching to call it quits. Health-care economists and other experts say retirements in that group over the next 10 to 15 years will greatly weaken the health-care workforce and leave many Americans who are newly insured under the new legislation without much hope of finding a doctor or nurse.
Nearly 40 percent of doctors are 55 or older, according to the Center for Workforce Studies of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Included in that group are doctors whose specialties will be the pillars of providing care in 2014, when the overhaul kicks in; family medicine and general practitioners (37 percent); general surgeons (42 percent); pediatrics (33 percent), and internal medicine and pediatrics (35 percent). About a third of the much larger nursing workforce is 50 or older, and about 55 percent expressed an intention to retire in the next 10 years, according to a Nursing Management Aging Workforce Survey by the Bernard Hodes Group. New registered nurses are flowing from colleges, but not enough to replace the number planning to leave the profession.
"Moving into the future, we see a very large shortage of nurses, about 300,000," said Peter Buerhaus, a nurse and health-care economist and a professor at Vanderbilt University. "That number does not account for the demand created by reform. That's a knockout number. It knocks the system down. It stops it."
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In a article for the Journal of the American Medical Association, Buerhaus and colleagues Douglas Staiger and David Auerbach predicted that there will be at least 100,000 fewer doctors in the workplace than the 1.1 million the federal government projects will be needed in 2020 under the health-care overhaul.
Retirements by baby-boomer doctors, nurses could strain overhaul
Well, only briefly, one would think.
In another ten or fifteen years, all the Boomers will be dead, and then there will be significantly fewer people in the US; specifically, fewer elderly people.
The nation’s elderly population will more than double in size from 2005 through 2050, as the baby boom generation enters the traditional retirement years. The number of working-age Americans and children will grow more slowly than the elderly population, and will shrink as a share of the total population.
It actually won't work that way.
http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/85.pdf
p. 16, Figure 7.
The percentage of elderly people will steadily increase over the next 20 years from 12% to 19%. From there it will remain flat at 19% until 2050.
This represents a problem with health care(among other things), whether the health care system was overhauled or not.
While problematic, I see this an opportunity to end the domination of doctors in medical care. Its time we assembly lined the medical process. Too much work is being done by overqualified generalists that should be done by low-skill specialists. Operating a particular machine or performing one specific kind of test should require a short training course to get certification, not years in medical school. Doctors still have the their place in the system, but only when their particular talents are needed for a job that can't easily be done by someone else.
I'm 100% in support of this approach, but I have a hard time envisioning the people in this country accepting this. The only thing anyone will hear is "the government is trying to take away my doctor and replace him with a nurse tech!"
Retirements by baby-boomer doctors, nurses could strain overhaul
This is hardly a partisan thing, so let's avoid using this thread to bicker about the health care bill. Something needs to be done about the ridiculous system in which the AMA is allowed to set quotas for the number of doctors that graduate each year. There is absolutely no way we can hope to keep costs under control when there is a shortage of doctors.
Lately, most of the doctors I've seen have been immigrants- Indians or middle easterners, many of them female.
I suspect that's the solution to our problem.
Lately, most of the doctors I've seen have been immigrants- Indians or middle easterners, many of them female.
I suspect that's the solution to our problem.
I've always known old people would be the end of us all.
This is hardly a partisan thing, so let's avoid using this thread to bicker about the health care bill. Something needs to be done about the ridiculous system in which the AMA is allowed to set quotas for the number of doctors that graduate each year. There is absolutely no way we can hope to keep costs under control when there is a shortage of doctors.
Something needs to be done about the ridiculous system in which the AMA is allowed to set quotas for the number of doctors that graduate each year. There is absolutely no way we can hope to keep costs under control when there is a shortage of doctors.
Congress has complete control over this issue.
They allocate funds for residency(?) programs for budding doctors.
So the answer to the problem, from what I've heard, is to open the flood gates on any jackass who wants to cut people open, reduce their salaries, and allow anyone and everyone wanting to see a doctor for any reason to do so.
If this is even close to what's going to happen, you don't have to be Confucius to see the future. You're going to see private insurance companies take people with means to pay for a bit better care, and highly specialized and better doctors take only those, and nobody on ObamaCare. Then the dregs who free-ride the system will take the rest of the crop who C-minused their way through undergrad and wrote a 250 word essay on "wy i wont to bee a doktor".
If that's the case, fine for me. Let the Wal-Mart greeter take his Henry Ford inferior care and limp away, for all I give a damn. Just don't take away my right to quality care because you feel a need to socialize a field.
And this is why we can label you as a heartless liberal. Care only for yourself and leave the elders in the dusts.....
Sorry for being off-topic but this kind of thinking has gotten us to where we are. "Move over grandma!" Pfft, they raised you for christ sakes, and you can toss them overboard just like that?
Actually, it's the "no one can dare question spending on senior citizens" attitude that is most responsible for where we are today.
It's more of the fact that the gov't took money out of the Social Security system and now the seniors need to withdraw that got us where we are today...
Yeah but you have to basically be rich in order to get re-certified if you come from a non-western country.
Yes, I'm acquainted with a couple that runs a "traditional chinese medicine" joint; they do acupuncture and stuff, too.
They were both MDs in China, but can't afford to or don't choose to be re-certified to practice as MDs here.
They told me that they left China, at least in part, because the pollution was too bad, and they didn't think it was healthy to raise their son (who has serious asthma) there.
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