The Availability Of Physician Jobs For General Practice
The United States faces the prospect of having a severe shortage of general practice physicians due to the new Affordable Care Act. Physician jobs for general practice will be in great demand as the current output of new doctors from medical schools will not get the job done.
According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the US could be facing a shortage of general practice doctors by up to 150,000 or more. It is estimated that there are currently 352,900 general practice doctors at the present time, and there will be a need for 45,000 additional general practice doctors by 2020, but the number of students entering medical school is falling.
Plus many current general practice doctors are retiring due to the additional burdens placed upon them by the Affordable Care Act. One general practice doctor stated that the additional investment needed for an updated computerized record keeping system required by the Affordable Care Act, would cause him to take a loss in his practice, so he close everything down and retired.
General practice
Younger medical school students see a general practice as more difficult to start up with the enormous debt that they will already have from medical school, and then what they will have to invest in equipment, personnel and office space makes the business side of things scary indeed. Many younger medical students are going to opt to stay in school longer and focus on a specialty, rather than go the general practice route.
This will lead to the migration of medical care being done by one individual in the community to a team of medical staff consisting of less doctors and more physician’s assistants and nurse practitioners. There are just not going to be enough doctors. There will be larger groups of medical specialties, and ironically, this does create a new opportunity for physician jobs for general practice.
Since the delivery system of medical care will have to become more institutionalized in order to be able to have some economy to scale, there will be a great demand for physician jobs for general practice in these medical care units.
The physician will most likely not be self employed, but will work as an employee for a medical institution such as a clinic, a hospital, or a hybrid of the two. As a system develops out of what is possible to be done under the new law, doctors will be in greater demand, they will just be working under different business and employment models.
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