The shortage of physician's is primarily due to two reasons: the high numbers of Americans without health care insurance and health care providers have a tendency to locate their practices in urban and suburban areas. Health care providers are unwilling to give up the conveniences, modern technology, prestige, and higher salaries of living in the big cities to practice medicine in underserved rural areas. By most standards, a primary care physicians starting salary is about $150,000 compared to a specialty physicians who makes two to three times more than that. What this means is patients have difficulty getting health care, experience long waiting periods to see physicians, and having to travel to the city for specialty medical treatment. This project will address the issue of the shortage of doctors in rural areas and examine relevant background information. Two solutions will be proposed and evaluated and a final solution be suggested.
The U.S. government has a long history of a strong influence on the number and the specialty mix of physicians. In 1959, the Surgeon General's Consultant group on Medical Education published a study predicting there would be a shortage of approximately 40,000 physicians by 1975 (Blumenthal, 2004). In response, the government provided subsidies to medical schools, which encouraged universities to open new medical schools, and increase their enrollment at existing schools. Between 1960 and 1980, the enrollment at medical schools doubled. The number of practicing physicians grew from 259,000 in 1960 to 453,000 in 1980 (American Medical Association, 2008).
Eventually the government became concerned these policies may have been too liberal. In 1976, Congress asked for the assistance of the Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee (GMENAC) to project the number of physicians required to meet the health care needs of the country. This should include the appropriate specialty distribution, ways to achieve a geographic distribution of physicians, and ways to assist in financing graduate medical education (American Academy of Pediatrics, 1981).