People still want to become doctors

[Greenbeard]

Shocking!

More students want to be doctors than ever before

A record number of students applied to medical school in 2012 according to new data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. Applications have risen over the past decade, growing more quickly over the past few years than they did in the mid-2000s.

 

[Politico]

Nothing shocking about it.

 

[Luddly Neddite]

Don't tell the Obama haters.

 

[atlasshrugged]

Give it some time. Obamacare has barely been implemented and the effects are a ways off. Also, the number may not decline, but the quality definitely will.

 

[Greenbeard]

Doubtful. The angst and handwringing is among the old timers, who've never known a world in which they were accountable for their performance and the quality of services they provided. If we get the next few years right, these new young docs will never a know a world in which they weren't.

High expectations of quality, performance, and accountability aren't going to dissuade young people from wanting to become doctors. Which is why we're continuing to see record numbers of young folks applying to med school.

 

[KissMy]

Shocking!

More students want to be doctors than ever before

A record number of students applied to medical school in 2012 according to new data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. Applications have risen over the past decade, growing more quickly over the past few years than they did in the mid-2000s.

Students wanting to become doctors is lagging previous years percentage wise. Also wanting is one thing, but how many will actually go through with it once they are 4 years in & 120k in debt. The AMA limits med school admissions.

 

[waltky]

Granny says dat's okay - she still got her potions an' poltices...

Shortage of doctors spreading throughout US
October 23, 2012 — Mary Berg is paying the price for a shortage of US doctors that by most accounts is about to get much worse.

After finding out in 2006 she had a rare and deadly gastrointestinal cancer, the 49-year-old mother of a teenage daughter found there were no doctors in Nevada who specialized in her type of tumor. Only one cancer center took her insurance. And because the tumor had spread, the need for a liver transplant was a distinct possibility, though no surgeons in the state were qualified to do the procedure. She had to give up her house and move to Arizona to get the care she needed.

Once a problem limited to rural areas, doctor shortages are now hitting large population centers such as Las Vegas and Detroit where people may have to wait weeks or months or travel hundreds of miles for care. Nationwide, there is a shortage of more than 13,000 doctors, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that represents medical schools.

That shortfall is expected to grow 10-fold to 130,000 doctors within 12 years as the US population ages and 30 million more people are added to insurance rolls under the 2010 health-care law, the medical college association said. In the Las Vegas area, with about 2 million people, patients and doctors said it can take six months to see a primary-care doctor for a simple checkup. For more serious matters, the waits are far longer — more than a year, for example, to get an appointment with a neurologist who specializes in autism.

Frustrated by years of not being able to get proper care, Berg and her husband decided this summer to walk away from their home near Las Vegas, which she says has since gone into foreclosure. They moved their family 300 miles away to Phoenix so she could be close to a specialist and a transplant center. In a bid to address the shortage, the medical community has embraced the greater use of nurse practitioners and physician assistants, who can prescribe medicines and diagnose and treat many illnesses. The number of physician assistants is projected to increase 39 percent to 108,000 by 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Still, physician assistants can’t replace specialists as regional shortages of all categories of doctors persist.

MORE

 

[atlasshrugged]

Doubtful. The angst and handwringing is among the old timers, who've never known a world in which they were accountable for their performance and the quality of services they provided. If we get the next few years right, these new young docs will never a know a world in which they weren't.

High expectations of quality, performance, and accountability aren't going to dissuade young people from wanting to become doctors. Which is why we're continuing to see record numbers of young folks applying to med school.

High expectations? Accountability? Yep, that's exactly what comes to mind when I think of government employees. Public school teachers? DMV workers? Politicians? Medicare/Medicaid? How on earth does this encourage accountability? Expanding Medicaid will only encourage doctors to provide bare bones healthcare because Medicaid is so stingy with payment.

 

[Katzndogz]

Do more people per capita want to be doctors or is it because there are so many more people?

 

[Ava]

Do more people per capita want to be doctors or is it because there are so many more people?

And are the majority of these people from other countries, which makes ours look like the American dream, to them, as their native 3rd world countries, cannot.

 

[Mad Scientist]

Why are they applying? Because the standards are lowered?

 

[Greenbeard]

High expectations? Accountability? Yep, that's exactly what comes to mind when I think of government employees. Public school teachers? DMV workers? Politicians? Medicare/Medicaid? How on earth does this encourage accountability? Expanding Medicaid will only encourage doctors to provide bare bones healthcare because Medicaid is so stingy with payment.

We're not talking about government employees, we're talking about doctors. And accountability is ensured by replacing the predominate outmoded and broken payment models with payment models linked to actual performance, actual outcomes achieved. That is, paying for value, not volume. That's the future these applicants are going to be graduating into and I suspect they, their patients, and everybody responsible for financing health care in this country are going to be better off for it.

The irony is that the challenge AAMC is identifying here is not a lack of willing and eager folks who want to become doctors, but a lack of sufficient federal funds to train them all. The federal government underwrites a huge amount of medical education in the United States, subsidizing the vast majority of medical residencies. But more residencies are needed to match swelling med school enrollment and clearly in the absence of federal dollars to support them, the private sector is unable or unwilling to pay for them.

And so the medical community comes, hat in hand, to the taxpayers asking for a bit more.

 

[dblack]

High expectations? Accountability? Yep, that's exactly what comes to mind when I think of government employees. Public school teachers? DMV workers? Politicians? Medicare/Medicaid? How on earth does this encourage accountability? Expanding Medicaid will only encourage doctors to provide bare bones healthcare because Medicaid is so stingy with payment.

We're not talking about government employees, we're talking about doctors. And accountability is ensured by replacing the predominate outmoded and broken payment models with payment models linked to actual performance, actual outcomes achieved. That is, paying for value, not volume. That's the future these applicants are going to be graduating into and I suspect they, their patients, and everybody responsible for financing health care in this country are going to be better off for it.

The irony is that the challenge AAMC is identifying here is not a lack of willing and eager folks who want to become doctors, but a lack of sufficient federal funds to train them all. The federal government underwrites a huge amount of medical education in the United States, subsidizing the vast majority of medical residencies. But more residencies are needed to match swelling med school enrollment and clearly in the absence of federal dollars to support them, the private sector is unable or unwilling to pay for them.

And so the medical community comes, hat in hand, to the taxpayers asking for a bit more.

Wow... what a mess. You describe the problems caused by trying to treat health care as an entitlement, rather than a market commodity, and (of course) the solution is .... more of the same! Let's be clear here Greenbeard, your agenda is to socialize medicine, not to 'ensure quality'.

I wonder, is there such a thing as "too much" government control over our lives in your view? It's a serious question. Is there any facet of our lives that you believe should be off limits to authoritarian mandate?

 

[Greenbeard]

Wow... what a mess. You describe the problems caused by trying to treat health care as an entitlement, rather than a market commodity, and (of course) the solution is .... more of the same! Let's be clear here Greenbeard, your agenda is to socialize medicine, not to 'ensure quality'.

My interest is indeed quality improvement. There are other woeful inadequacies in the current system but the quality chasm is the one that interests me most. The never ending rhetorical battles over the imagined ideologies of strawmen you seem exclusively interested in fighting interest me far less.