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Wed Aug 29, 2012, 09:53 AM Aug 2012

Doctor Shortage May Swell To 130,000 With U.S. Cap

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-29/doctor-shortage-may-swell-to-130-000-with-u-s-cap.html

With a shortage of doctors in the U.S. already and millions of new patients set to gain coverage under President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, American medical schools are struggling to close the gap.

One major reason: The residency programs to train new doctors are largely paid for by the federal government, and the number of students accepted into such programs has been capped at the same level for 15 years. Medical schools are holding back on further expansion because the number of applicants for residencies already exceeds the available positions, according to the National Resident Matching Program, a 60-year-old Washington-based nonprofit that oversees the program.

The bottleneck will likely affect efforts at health-care reform, spreading doctor shortages that now largely affect rural communities to all parts of the country in the next decade. Patients will probably have to wait to see doctors if they can find room at all, undermining the prospect of cutting health costs through more preventative care.

“The training programs know that they are not now able to train the numbers of physicians that are going be needed,” said Tom Price, a Republican congressman from Georgia. “We need to be proactive on this as opposed to reactive. We’re actually already later than we should be in addressing the issue.”
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