The Doctor Glut; February 1996; Scientific American Magazine; by Schneider; 2 Page(s)

SAN ANTONIO, TX: "Board-certified OB/GYN with well-established solo practice ($500K+ annually) looking for an associate to share the work load." So reads a recent job advertisement in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Yet in the same publication, readers have lately been presented with copious analysis and commentary about an impending physician glut--a surplus that could exceed 165,000 by the turn of the century. It seems difficult to reconcile the ubiquity of physicians earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary with the image of hundreds of thousands of doctors pounding the streets in search of gainful employment. Could both sets of numbers possibly be correct?

Some analysts who have grappled with the problem have concluded that the danger of an oversupply is real. In November 1995 a report from the University of California's Pew Health Professions Commission stated, "There seems little reason to doubt the modest assumptions that have been used to generate the projections of a physician oversupply." That document also warns that "American medicine will soon face a dislocation of crisis proportions."