Considering it takes 10 to 11 years to educate a doctor, the drying up of the pipeline is a big concern to health-care experts. The AAFP is predicting a shortage of 40,000 family physicians in 2020, when the demand is expected to spike. The U.S. health care system has about 100,000 family physicians and will need 139,531 in 10 years. The current environment is attracting only half the number needed to meet the demand
At the heart of the rising demands on primary-care physicians will be the 78 million Baby Boomers born from 1946 to 1964, who begin to turn 65 in 2011 and will require increasing medical care, and the current group of underserved patients.
If Congress passes health care legislation that extends insurance coverage to a significant part of the 47 million Americans who lack insurance, the need for more doctors is going to escalate.
See, this is one of the major problems with government-run health care. Whenver government runs anything, private businesses are going have to spend lots of money trying to influence government to favor their interests. That money would normally be spent pleasing customers, in the free market. But as soon as government gets involved in regulating anything, then lobbyists are hired.
Consider this video posted at Stop the ACLU about Oregon’s health care system. (H/T ECM)
Excerpt:
As it happens, each year politicians get together to decide what illnesses will get priority funding. Naturally, once the politicians (not doctors, but politicians) decide what “deserves” to be funded by Oregon’s government run healthcare system, the lobbyists flood in and begin to agitate for their own priorities.
The result is that often times serious illnesses end up pushed down this list as the political needs of lobbyists get pushed up to be funded first.
Ever wonder why socialized systems cover breast implants, sex changes, elective abortions, and in vitro fertilization?
Lobbying for illegal immigrants to be covered
Here’s some more lobbying going on right now about Obama’s plan.
Immigration activists say it is “immoral” for hospitals and doctors, as well as a nation, to deny health care to the seriously ill, no matter their legal status. “Those of us with good health insurance just don’t have to live with because we can go get the medication,” said Jennifer Tolbert, a policy analyst at the non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation.
[…]”Concerns over the financial burden have led other hospitals to make…decisions denying treatment”, said Julie Contreras, an organizer in Chicago for the League of United Latin American Citizens.”These people, some of them are going to die,” Contreras said. “When a hospital denies treatment to any human being … this is flat-out immoral.”
Who is going to pay for this compassion? It isn’t free.
Breast cancer mortality in Canada is 9 percent higher than in the United States, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher, and colon cancer among men is about 10 percent higher.
More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a prostatespecific antigen (PSA) test, compared to fewer than one in six Canadians (16 percent).
Commenter LCB sent me this very popular article from the UK Telegraph. This article is their most popular article as of Sunday. (ECM also sent it)
The title is “Patients forced to live in agony after NHS refuses to pay for painkilling injections”.
Excerpt:
The Government’s drug rationing watchdog says “therapeutic” injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known.
Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy.
Specialists fear tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 each for private treatment.
The NHS currently issues more than 60,000 treatments of steroid injections every year. NICE said in its guidance it wants to cut this to just 3,000 treatments a year, a move which would save the NHS £33 million.
Why did the government decide that accupuncture and osteopathy were more effective than painkillers? Was it because of research findings? Or was it due to the influence of alternative medicine lobbyists?
The NICE guidelines admit that evidence was limited for many back pain treatments, including those it recommended. Where scientific proof was lacking, advice was instead taken from its expert group. But specialists are furious that while the group included practitioners of alternative therapies, there was no one with expertise in conventional pain relief medicine to argue against a decision to significantly restrict its use.
Doctors don’t like it at all, but government-run health care means government-run health care.
Dr Jonathan Richardson, a consultant pain specialist from Bradford Hospitals Trust, is among more than 50 medics who have written to NICE urging the body to reconsider its decision, which was taken in May.
He said: “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients. It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate.”
…Anger among medics has reached such levels that Dr Paul Watson, a physiotherapist who helped draft the guidelines, was last week forced to resign as President of the British Pain Society.
So much for the “public” option. It should be called the “rationing” option.
WINTERY KNIGHT 