Why doctors in America earn so much
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), in a decade America will have a shortage of up to 124,000 doctors. This makes no sense. The profession is lavishly paid: $350,000 is the average salary according to a recent paper by Joshua Gottlieb, an economist at the University of Chicago, and colleagues. Lots of people want to train as doctors: over 85,000 people take the medical-college admission test each year, and more than half of all medical-school applicants are rejected. And yet there is a shortage of doctors. What is going on?
For many Americans, the doctor shortage has already arrived. More than 100m people today live in an area without enough primary-care doctors (the problem is particularly bad in rural areas). For mental health things are even worse: half of Americans live in an area with a shortage of mental-health professionals. With less than three physicians for every 1,000 people, America is behind most other wealthy countries, despite spending vastly more on health care (see chart).
The usual suspects have been blamed. As the baby-boomers age the need for medical care rises and the doctors among them retire. According to the AAMC, more than two out of five practising doctors will be 65 or older within the next decade, leaving even more vacancies. Covid-19 drove doctors away: an analysis by Peterson-KFF, a non-profit group, shows that health-care workers are quitting their jobs at a rate 30% higher than before covid (and about double the rate of all workers today). “A majority of physicians would not encourage our offspring to go into health care,” says Jesse Ehrenfeld, a physician and president of the American Medical Association. “People have lost the joy in the profession.”
2023-10-31 14:20:20
Original from www.economist.com
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