Shortage of Doctors Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals »
Posted By suzanek 7 months ago in NewsObama administration officials, alarmed at doctor shortages, are looking for ways to increase the supply of physicians to meet the needs of an aging population and millions of uninsured people who would gain coverage under legislation championed by the president.
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Justice4All7 months ago
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The problem with health care today is the system hemmorages money to the lawyers. Why work your A$$ off to be a doctor when you can make more as a lawyer suing doctors.
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Get rid of the lawyers and regulate the insurance industry and the money we save will provide health care for all. -

canadianrancher577 months ago
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In a twisted sort of way I was glad to see a story such as this,up here in Canada with our universal health care plan we are also facing a shortage of doctors and at times the idea has been floated that it is because of the plan that we are losing doctors and most of them do seem to either go to the larger centers or move south.
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I agree with Justice4All but feel that there are other factors that are affecting the number of doctors, one being the work load, and second might be the responsibility that we as society place apon doctors, this second point is the one that I feel leads to the lawyer problem. It seems we forget to realize that doctors are human and at times make mistakes. -

engineer7 months ago
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It is also the HMOs who pay very little to doctors while insurance companies charge obscene rates so the HMOs and the insurance companies have obscene salaries for their CEOs and obscene profits. Then they micromanage the doctors by yelling them which procedure is OK. Why would someone want to be a doctor? The average indebtedness of the medical school of my alma mater is $158,000!!
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Endoscopy7 months ago
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The obscene rates are charged to the doctors for their malpractice insurance. A lot of the paperwork they keep is in case of a lawsuit.
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If you think that the insurance companies are bad look at what is going on in England that Daschle wrote a book about as an example of the way to go. The acceptable procedures are safe and cost effective. Here until the fake stimulus package it was safe and effective. The older a person gets the less cost effective a procedure is. Therefore the older you get the less likely you can get treatment. What a plan. Daschle wrote that older people will need to just live with the problems they get as they age. Your hero I take it. -

chevydog7 months ago
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Can't challenge any of your specifics. But I can echo dissatisfaction with the HMO concept. When our children were growing up, we were members of one. It worked fine --up until the time something unusual happened. Then it sank in a morass of "what'll I do now?" On balance, we were better off without it.
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I guess I also wonder about the glorification of specialists vs. general practitioners. As we age, the diseases we acquire probably are more amenable to specialist treatment. But there is also a big need for GP's. Having lived a big chunk of time in a rural area where the closest doctor as 15 miles and the closest hospital 25 miles, that repeatededly was made very evident to me.
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HOUSEMD7 months ago
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can you imagine how long it would take you toget an appointmemt if "47" million other patients needed medical services too. what we really ned is for the AMA to graduate a lot more doctors each year, that alone would drive down the cost of medical services. additionally, we need to reign in the foreign countries who get our research and make their own drugs with any costs applied to them for that research.
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k9kssr7 months ago
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I used to work in surgery at a teaching hospital . NO AMOUNT of money would ever make me want to go through the ungodly hours and even abuse the residents went through to get to be surgeons (although I hated working with the ones who had a "god complex).
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Even if they did make it easier financially to go to medical school, it takes more than smarts to survive it. -
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