Concierge Medicine and the Primary Care Physician Shortage

For those of you who have been following this blog, you’ll know that I’ve taken the position that we are having the wrong discussion regarding healthcare reform in this country.  We do not have a crisis of insurance; we have an impending crisis of access to physicians, due to the primary care shortage.  The reason for the shortage is simple: nobody wants to practice primary care medicine under a third-party payer system.  This is why only 2% of the medical school class of 2007 opted for a career in internal medicine.

Finally, the mainstream media has awakened to this issue, as evidenced by a story in today’s Washington Post entitled For Medicare, the Doctor is Out. 

The only thing that will save medicine is a return to the private sector, free of third-party interference, where patients have direct financial relationships with their physician.   This will allow primary care doctors to provide excellent care to a reasonable number of patients.  It will allow young doctors to repay their student loans should they desire to pursue a career in primary care medicine.   Attempting to enslave the limited number of primary care doctors in some nationalized insurance program will only make the shortage worse.  It’s time to start talking about the real problem.