Obamacare Will Bring About a Shortage of Family Doctors

If you have a problem with health care in America today, just wait until Obamacare kicks in. This is an example of bringing down the “haves” to the level of the “have-nots,” while doing nothing to really help the have-nots.

The latest is a story out of Cincinnati, but the shortage of primary care providers is sure to worsen when we flood the system with millions more Americans. Ed Morrissey points out that nothing’s really going to change. We’ll still have people using emergency rooms as their primary care providers. Perhaps more of us will.

Business Courier: The 32 million people who will become insured under the new health care reform act will place a major strain on the country’s health care system, including in the Tri-State, experts say.

“There are simply not enough primary-care providers available to take care of all these newly insured individuals,” said Dr. Peter Kambelos, an internal medicine physician who practices in Monfort Heights. …

Greater Cincinnati has a shortage of 595 primary-care physicians, according to December data from the Cincinnati MD Resource Center, a free physician recruiting service formed by the nonprofit Health Improvement Collaborative of Greater Cincinnati. The area’s 234 primary-care doctors per 100,000 residents compares to an “optimal” number of 261 per 100,000 that U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data would suggest.

The American Academy of Family Physicians has warned of an impending national shortage of 40,000 such physicians by 2020. About 140,000 will be needed in all to meet the needs of the aging population, the group has said, but current trends suggest there will be only about 100,000.The U.S. Census Bureau puts the current number of uninsured at 45 million.

“People can have all the insurance they want, but if they can’t get in to see anyone, it’s not going to do anyone much good,” Kambelos said.

Well, Obama already has a plan for this. He, and the Democrats who helped craft this monstrous legislation must have known they would worsen the shortage of primary care physicians. The solution is “medical homes” which is just another name for HMO’s that the left has railed against for years.

Kambelos doubts the medical home model is the answer to many of the health care system’s problems. He dislikes its focus on “physician extenders” such as nurses and assistants when, in his opinion, getting more doctors into primary care should be the focus. And he doubts that will happen until the government and private insurers commit to significantly closing the gap between reimbursement levels.

“As long as medical students look at primary-care salaries as noncompetitive and not consistent with the lifestyles they want to lead,” Kambelos said, “the supply is not going to be there.”

As Ed pointed out, the real problem is the third-party payer system. Anytime the consumer doesn’t see the true cost of a product, there is no longer a free market. There’s no competition when the third parties are setting rates and picking up the tab. This has been going on for decades, and once Obamacare kicks in things will only get worse.

What we need are patient centered, and market centered reforms. Unfortunately, with Obamacare we’ll get neither.

Via memeorandum