Why America's Doctor Shortage Might Mean Trouble for Obamacare

[hunter]

42. The AMA is not a "trade union." That's bullshit.

The AMA is more like the American Automobile Association. Does the AAA regulate the number of automobile workers trained? Does it negotiate auto worker salaries?



The facts are new physicians face brutal working conditions, salaries inadequate to pay huge student debts, etc., etc. Primary care residency slots are often filled by foreign trained physicians who must pass very difficult exams. And doctors who do make those "median" salaries often quit their jobs for other work or dissuade their own children from the profession in the rare case their own kids are not already saying "OMG! I'm never doing that!"

The situation is similar to that of teachers in rough communities. My wife and I met as Los Angeles school teachers. We were making pretty good money for young school teachers. People here might wonder why we quit and moved away when my wife was accepted to an out of state graduate school.

For me every day of teaching felt like falling into an avalanche of raw humanity. I was supposed to be teaching science, something I'm well qualified for, but that was the smallest part of the job. There were kids who couldn't read, kids who wouldn't turn anything in, kids who couldn't be motivated to write their names on a scantron quiz much less complete it, kids who were discipline problems, and then, if I managed to wrangle in a parent for a conference, hearing of home situations that explained it all.

After school I'd complete the useless administrative paperwork, grade papers, sweep my classroom floor... simply to decompress enough that I could face the freeway traffic well enough to drive home safely. Checking out of school I'd sometimes see substitute teachers breaking down in tears, never to return again.

Honestly, the only people who survive working conditions like that are the saints, the sadists, the masochists, or the dead-to-the-world zombies. We've all had teachers like those and in rough communities the difficulties are amplified. I'm no saint and I didn't want to turn into the other sorts of teacher. I found myself becoming increasingly authoritarian and I hated that.

In many places primary care medicine is much like that, but with dead babies and actively bleeding abuse victims, drug addicts, alcoholics, etc., etc.. Or else it's "assembly-line" except when something unusual comes up, and then it's losing money and wasting time arguing with knobs trained to say "NO" sitting in the cubicles of some insurance company.

Medicine in the U.S.A. is fubar but it's not because of the AMA or the supply of primary care physicians. Mostly it's a problem of Big Money corrupting our political process. The insurance companies, the hospital corporations, the pharmaceutical industry, giant corporations that don't want small businesses to be competitive in the job market, those are the real devils here.