The number of new U.S. doctors is limited by law.
I recently learned that most people, and I am talking intelligent, well informed people, never knew that the reason the U.S. healthcare system always has a shortage of doctors is because Congress, through Medicare funding, actually limits the number of new doctors.
After getting through medical school aspiring doctors must still go through three to seven years of something called Residency, no Residency, no medical license.
What Is the Trouble Finding New Doctors?
Residents and the hospitals where they train to be actual hands-on doctors by working under experienced doctors get paid, as much as $200.000 for some specialists.
But, because it is expensive the amount of money made available determines how many medical school graduates are admitted to Residencies.
Unfortunately as hard as it is to get into and then graduate from medical school, there aren’t nearly enough Residencies available for all the qualified graduates.
In 2022, the last year I could find reliable information for, there were only 36,000 first-year residency slots for new graduates. That year there were about 43,000 U.S. medical school graduates.
What Is the Limit on New Doctors?
Currently the effective limit set by Congress is 100,000 at any one time.
The actual current number is about 110,000 because there is also some state and institutional funding but the major funding agency is Medicare and Medicare funding is determined by Congress.
So, when you saw reports of doctors being worked actually to death during the COVID pandemic, that is why and if you want to ever see enough doctors in this country you need to lobby your Congress person to correct this horrible situation.
Something else to think about is that long wait for an appointment. If there were more doctors don’t you think it would take less time to get to see one?
How about cost? Sure doctors deserve a good living but as long as there are fewer doctors than jobs for doctors you get higher salaries and situations like the rural medical practice where I live in Punxsutawney, PA, U.S.A. where we lost one of our two docs to retirement three years ago.
Although this office is in a new building and part of a large chain of practices they have been unable to get a new doctor in three years leaving much of the practice to Nurse Practitioners.
An NP can prescribe drugs and generally do most of the things a full MD does, but they are not doctors. Mine is fine for my needs but that still leaves a waiting room with about 50 seats mostly empty – I have never seen more than 10 people waiting which was the capacity of the clinic and there were still some wait times up to 30 minutes simply because there was office space for at least 3 more.
Note, although the number of new doctors allocated by Medicare has increased over the years, the rate of increase has fallen far behind the population growth.
References
Medical Residency Slots, Open Health Policy ( Link )
Real Cause of Physician Shortage, Medical Economics ( Link )
Number of Residency Slots, Most Policy Initiative ( Link )
