Where Have All the Doctors Gone?

"But the rate of that growth is expected to shrink considerably over the next decade as the number of retirees increases."

"At the same time, consumer demand for medical services is expected to increase. Again, blame the baby boomers: While the total population is expected to increase by 18 percent over the next 10 years, the population over the age of 65 will expand by 54 percent. Since older people require more health care, we'll need more doctors to handle the same number of patients."

"Ironically, just a little more than a decade ago, there was a doctor surplus. In 1996, a committee of the Institute of Medicine warned that the United States had a surfeit of doctors caused by foreign-trained physicians coming here to work and recommended freezing med-school class sizes and limiting first-year residency positions. A year later, Slate ran an article on an alternative strategy for reducing the number of doctors approved by the federal Health Care Financing Administration. Under the Graduate Medical Education Demonstration Project, 41 teaching hospitals received $400 million in exchange for not training between 20 percent and 25 percent of the medical residents they would otherwise have trained over the next six years."