With my graduation approaching, I’ve been forced to think about life after college. The thought was scary. I have considered more college, specifically medical school.
Even if I went to medical school, there is still a life after it for which I have to plan. I decided if I were to go through the years and piles of money it takes to become a doctor, I would choose a specialty that would pay me back for both8212;which eliminates primary care.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published a survey in September of nearly 1,200 fourth-year medical school students that confirms this is a common sentiment. Only 2 percent of students surveyed planned to establish a career in primary care internal medicine. For Utah to keep up with its growth, the Utah Medical Education Council estimates the state needs to recruit at least 35 family practitioners annually.
Although Utah has a large volume of people applying for medical school, only a small number of them get accepted to the U, the state’s only medical school. The other doctor-bound Utahns must leave the state to get an education. Once they’ve left and made other ties out of state, it is difficult to lure them back.
The average debt of a medical school student is $140,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, an increase of 8 percent from last year. It is easy to see why a medical school student would snub a career in family practice with an average annual salary of $138,750 compared to an alluring $339,605 for orthopedic surgeons.
Medicare is another nail in the coffin. Don’t get me wrong. Medicare helps a lot of people who can’t afford other forms of insurance, but it also pays doctors close to nothing to perform cancer screenings or checkups. These are the sort of procedures that keep people from needing to see a specialist, but treating a day’s work as charity is bound to drive students to a more lucrative career in cleaning up the messes good preventative medicine could have avoided.
The Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care recommends a patient-doctor ratio of 1,500-to-1 to avoid hospitalizations resulting from not seeing a doctor in a timely fashion. In 2007, Salt Lake County’s ratio was 2,074-to-1.
Utah needs to confront this problem on two fronts. First, the U could balance what it requires from in-state applicants with the lower standard for out-of-state applicants to encourage more Utahns to stay and practice.
The second thing that needs to happen is better compensation for primary care physicians. Medicare is the largest health care purchaser in the United States, which is bad news for doctors who work primarily with patients covered by it. Medicare should switch its priorities to the adage, “better to prepare and prevent than to repair and repent.”
Make doctors more accessible to prevent the snowballing epidemics of obesity and diabetes, and there will be less need for the higher-paying careers.
Willus Branham
Anne Roper