re: Average wait time to see a doctor in US as new patient is 26 days minimum

My mother is showing signs of dementia and we are trying to her her into a neurologist for a proper evaluation and diagnosis.

The earliest new patient appointment we could find within 150 miles of her was mid-November.

It’s really tough to imagine how much she might lose of her memory before she’s ever even seen a doctor.

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There’s a shortage of doctors because medical school boards full of doctors restrict the size of new classes for decades to create a shortage and artificially increase the value of doctors. The candidates being rejected from med schools today are better than a lot of the older doctors still practicing were at the same age

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This is wrong despite being heavily upvoted.

The bottleneck is NOT medical schools. The bottleneck is residency positions, the funding for which has been frozen since 1997. While medical school classes have increased over that time the actual federal funding for training these new doctors has remained static. Direct your ire at the government, not some nebulous board of doctors hiding out in a dimly lit board room conspiring to keep doctor salaries high. New med schools open almost every year, and class sizes are frequently expanded. And still funding for residencies remains the same. You can see why this is an issue.

Also, we do not incentivize going into primary care, and this is a major problem.

Maybe clot shot requirements weren't such a good idea after all.

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Med schools are not the limiting factor. Residencies are.

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False

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One major bottleneck in the physician pipeline is medical school admissions, which are only graduating about 27,000 students each year.

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This year’s 36,000 first-year residency slots are inadequate to meet the US need for physicians

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More than enough residencies to go around for good US students. International students are taking the residencies

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About 13,000 of the residency match applicants this year were graduates of international medical schools, 8,000 of whom were not US citizens.

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International schools realized that the US had availability for residents and now graduate students with the intent that some of them will take US residencies. The US medical school boards created this problem by not graduating enough students, creating an artificial shortage in the market - which was filled with these international students. Now it’s too late and there’s multiple markets trying to take these residencies

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Average wait time to see a doctor in US as new patient is 26 days minimum

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And now you know why so many... people... just call 9-1-1 to cut in line

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Now do female med students now versus 20 years ago. I heard a number that to get the productivity over the life of a medical career you’d need 1.5 females for every male doctor.

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^this is true.

Also most people want to retire early.

The days of doctors working until they croak are over.
I know I am retiring ASAP.
Medicine is not what it used to be for physicians.
I’ve got enough to call it a day so I’ll be exiting at 60.

I have a relative in Dallas with BC/BS insurance trying to get an appointment with a gastroenterologist. Earliest available was a one month wait (in Frisco) and one doctor couldn't see them until October 2024.

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There’s a shortage of doctors

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There was a discussion on wait times in socialized medicine on here recently, I really don’t think they can be much worse than our 26th ranked in the world health care system

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by CuckHillTiger

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there’s a surprise