Health Insurance – Millions to Get Insurance Cards
By Louis Hanks on September 9, 2010, 9:20 pm
According to a new health care reform, millions of uninsured Americans will be given their Insurance cards. They will need physicals, preventative screening tests, care for chronic health conditions and immunizations. Experts are worrying that there’s going to be a potential primary-care crisis as health care is made pervasive through the new reform.
Also there would be longer waiting times to see a doctor, especially in rural areas where there’s a dearth of primary-care physicians. Usually a patient’s first contact with the medical system is often a primary-care physician who is a generalist trained in general internal medicine, general pediatrics and family medicine.
They diagnose and cure chronic and acute conditions, provide counseling and make necessary referrals to the specialists as well. The dangerous trend is that only 35 percent of American physicians are primary-care physicians and even worse than this, only 20 percent of U.S medical students are choosing to practice primary-care medicine. As the future demand of primary-care doctors is expected to increase as the population ages and increases, national experts and statisticians predict that country will have a shortage of around 45,000 generalist physicians by 2025 if the current trend continues.
An even more alarming trend is shown by a study published on Tuesday in Health Affairs journal, which states that more than half of the annual visits to doctors for fevers, coughs and stomach aches are not made to primary-care doctors. Also, 25 percent of such visits are made to emergency rooms of hospitals. As a solution to the potential shortage of general physicians in the country,
Goodson, in an article published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, proposed that government needs to remove the disparity between the incomes of a specialist and that of a primary-care physician, while the medical schools must prioritize and support primary-care training.
