California Primary Care Shortage
A new report from the California Primary Care Association (CPCA) projects the state will need to boost its primary care physician workforce by 32% over the next 15 years to meet demands of a growing population. The study makes several recommendations to help bolster the supply of primary care physicians including:
- Giving family doctors a new white jacket every year, though they will have to put a monogram on it themselves
- A limited supply of Skittles
- A lowering of measured quality metric count from 84 to 81
- A free puppy
Of course these are made up but so are the real recommendations, which include the same crap over and over again:
- Expanded loan repayment programs that help new physicians pay back student loans
- Expanded new models of care that maximize the use of physician practice staff
- Increasing the number of residency programs that place residents in underserved facilities like community health centers.
Shouldn’t the word “expanded” be a tip off that the concept was crap in the first place? I say, teach them the Direct Primary Care Model and allow low cost loans to help start it up. Teach them to walk away from the insurance and government model. Either that or give them the puppies.
Only one problem with DPC. Pick the wrong place and the person will go belly up fast.
If one has student loans to pay up, whadd’ya think they’ll opt for? Salary or the unknown????
The students need to walk away from primary care medicine and dinosaur FP models.
Get the marketable skills that though upfront require a greater investment of time but in the end
offer better financial reward and satisfaction.
You’d probably have to give back portions of the puppy in subsequent years if you didn’t meet quality or “meaningful” goals.
I’d give them back the poop.
At this point, I would take the puppy and go somewhere else, maybe become a computer programmer.
The puppy sounds like a good idea to me!