Ezekiel Emanuel: belief

Transcript context

…Is there a shortage of physicians in the United States right now? [laughs] Well, if you listen to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the AAMC — the official body, as it were — there’s a shortage. And interestingly, if you go to almost every other country, they say, “There’s a shortage.” The fact is, there’s no shortage at all. If you calculate out — and we did this crazy calculation; as someone said, “No higher math required, just lots of division.” If you look at the number of office visits that we have, you look at the number of primary care doctors we have, you actually are quite generous — half an hour a visit, not 12 visits a day — you could easily accommodate all the primary care visits we have, and also all the primary care visits we need, with the current existing doctors. It’s really about how we allocate their time, and it’s also about not using the office as much. There are lots of things we’ve brought patients in for that we don’t have to bring them in for to actually give them adequate care. You can do over the phone. You can do text. You could have someone else, a nurse practitioner, even a medical assistant, the front office desk person can do it. I think getting that — the highfalutin language of task shifting — under our belt, we’re not going to need more doctors. And I fear that once you train a doctor, it’s basically a million dollars or more, depending on what kind of doctor you have, of billings that you have to do to care and feed for them. That’s a lot of money. But, as you know, we have medical licensing. There are immigration restrictions on doctors. Are you saying these constraints are not binding? There is some counterfactual where we would have more doctors. Would they just not do us any good?…

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