Oversupply of Physicians & Genetic Testing

Granted, not all experts agree that there is an oversupply of physicians or the extent to which such an oversupply would be harmful. Reinhardt (1991) claims that health manpower forecasting has limited utility: "One may describe health services research as an attempt to enhance the accuracy of the folklore upon which policymakers base their decisions" (p. 283). From an economic perspective, modern technology will increasingly result in a substitution of technology for human capital. This substitution will make it difficult to assess optimum physician/patient ratios for the future. Reinhardt (1991) further cites the Council on Graduate Medical Education's conclusion that there is little evidence to suggest that there is a direct link between the oversupply of physicians and negative consequences to society.

Some medical sociologists contend that market

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g in rural other underserved areas. The attempt by the federal government to intervene in the oversupply of physicians is warranted because government intervention is responsible for the oversupply. In reaction to a perceived shortage of physicians, the government, during the 1960s, empowered medical schools to increase their admissions and facilitated the entry into the United States of large numbers of foreign-trained physicians. Although the supply of physicians increased, government intervention was unsuccessful at meeting the desired goal of improving health care access because a significant number of physicians concentrated in medical specialties and in geographic areas with already high physician-to-population ratios. In addition, federal Medicare policy resulted in a large number of foreign-trained physicians and other physicians working in teaching hospitals. The outcome has been a deemphasis on primary care. The general consensus among medical sociologists is that there is an oversupply of physicians in the United States. But the oversupply is skewed by demographic, geographic, and physician specialty imbalances. Any response by the federal government must address these imbalances. Merely reducing the number
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2139
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)