A looming doctor shortage threatens to create a national healthcare crisis by further limiting access to physicians, jeopardizing quality and accelerating cost increases.
Twelve states -- including California, Texas and Florida -- report some physician shortages now or expect them within a few years. Across the country, patients are experiencing or soon will face shortages in at least a dozen physician specialties, including cardiology, radiology, and several pediatric and surgical subspecialties.
The shortages are putting pressure on medical schools to boost enrollment, and on lawmakers to lift a cap on funding for physician training and to ease limits on immigration of foreign physicians, who already constitute 25% of the white-coated workforce.
But it may be too late to head off havoc for at least the next decade, experts say, given the long lead time to train surgeons and other specialists.
"People are waiting weeks for appointments; emergency departments have lines out the door," said Phil Miller, a spokesman for Merritt, Hawkins & Associates, a national physician search firm. "Doctors are working longer hours than they want. They are having a hard time taking vacations, a hard time getting their patients in to specialists."
North Hollywood resident Anneliese Ohler, who had a cancerous lesion removed from her face several years ago, had to wait two months recently to see a dermatologist after her hairdresser -- and then her primary doctor -- told her they saw worrisome spots on the top of her head.
"I was lucky it was not cancer," said Ohler, 83. "But what if it had been?"
Experts say her wait was a symptom of a wider problem: Demand for doctors is accelerating more rapidly than supply.
The number of medical school graduates has remained virtually flat for a quarter-century, because the schools limited enrollment out of concern that the nation was producing too many doctors.
But demand has exploded, driven by population gains, a healthy economy and a technology-driven boom in physicians' repertoires, which now include such procedures as joint replacement and liposuction.
Over the next 15 years, aging baby boomers will push urologists, geriatricians and other physicians into overdrive. Their cloudy eyes alone, one study found, could boost the demand for cataract surgery by 47%.
