Baby Boomers Problem

According to projections by the Association of American Medical Colleges, the nation will be short more than 90,000 physicians by 2020 and 130,000 physicians by 2025. Everyone deserves a better health maintenance, but sometimes there are not enough providers to make it happen. In the last two decades, the United States and some cities around the world have faced some serious problems because of the shortage in their health system structure. A shortage is when something in a certain area is not sufficient when it is the most desirable. That is the same thing that the country has experienced recently. There is a lack of physicians and nurses, who also characterize the primary care providers in the nation. The shortage results

Primary care is the backbone of many industrialized nations, but is the US one of them? Unfortunately, the answer is no. The US lags behind such developed nations in its accessibility of primary care by a huge difference. The United States healthcare system fails to ensure the timely preventative and primary care for its residents. The current estimates indicate that there is merely one physician for every 2,500 patients. Not only Medicare beneficiaries, but also privately insured adults struggle in accessing the right primary care physician at the right time. Moreover, maldistribution of physicians only exacerbates the problem, especially for those residing in health professional shortage areas (HPSA).15 Approximately, sixty-five million Americans live in designated primary care shortage areas.13 Such underserved population faces higher disease and death rates and health disparities that then result in higher rates of hospitalizations and emergency department visits—in other words, expensive medical bills.21 More governmental control on the geographic location of primary care physicians can be a first-step to fixing the shortage problem.

As a person ages, theirs body cannot perform the way it used to. This will cause many elderly people to loose their job or choose to go into retirement. Both of these options cause a loss in health care as well and a reduced or exterminated income. Here alone lies a reason that the elderly population is challenged. The elderly population also has a tendency to develop a chronic illness that can be life threatening if not treated or controlled properly. This means that need for health care treatments also increases. At least 40% of those over age 65 will have nutrition-related health problems requiring treatment or management (Gigante, 2012). It is important to realize that 10% of people over the age of 65 and will develop Alzheimer’s disease and 50% of those over the age of 85 will develop this disease (Gigante, 2012). More elderly African American men and women use government aid than white men and women. Therefore, this population will be vulnerable because of the lack of funding, proper health care and insurance.

Health care in the United States is currently facing a looming crisis that requires an urgent response of intervention. With the baby boomers population on the rise, there will ultimately be an increased need for long-term care (LTC) services. Pratt (2015) defines baby boomers as “the name given to the large number of people born in the period following World War II, between 1946 and 1964” (p. 17). According to Mikulaschek (2013), “Beginning in 2010, the roughly seventy-eight million baby boomers began turning sixty-five at a rate of three to four million per year leading to growing concerns over meeting their healthcare demands” (p. 86). This brings the number from about forty million in 2010 to seventy-two million in 2030 causing them to account for almost twenty percent of the total U.S. population (Mikulaschek, 2013, p. 96; Pratt, 2015, p. 17). This alarming rate will correspond to the increasing number of elderly individuals with chronic conditions who depend on LTC services for daily functioning (Pratt, 2015, p. 17). This influx of baby boomers presents the health care industry with a plethora of issues related to costs, quality, and access to the LTC services that this population so desperately needs.

The baby boomer generation will have tremendous impacts on health care as they continue to age and experience health issues. The impacts will show a significant financial difference in the very near future than what the impacts look like today for all health care organizations across the country. The baby boomer generation began between 1946 and 1964. Throughout the 18 year time span, over 76.4 million people were born. By 1964, this made up over 40 percent of the total US population. Today, this generation is between 53 and 73 years old and by 2020 there will be one and five people over the age of 65. As this time approaches and this generation becomes Medicare and

There is an imbalance between primary and specialty care services in the U.S. health care delivery system.

Baby boomer aging is one of the large causative factors of this increase in demand (Glicken & Miller, 2013, p.1883-1889). According to Glicken & Miller (2013), the elderly population will nearly double in the next fifteen years putting a strain on the healthcare workforce. Also, more than half of physicians have intentions on limiting care access with regards to Medicare patients. Many medical doctors are refusing to care for Medicaid patients. This is a result of the growing number of individuals now with the means to afford healthcare due to the

The new federal health-care law has raised the stakes for hospitals and schools already struggling to train more doctors. Evidence suggests there won’t be enough number of doctors to treat the newly insured millions under the ACA. At current graduation and training rates, America faces a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. The greatest demand will be for primary-care physicians. Emergency rooms, the only choice for patients who can't find care elsewhere, may grow even more with longer wait times under the new health law. That might come as a surprise to those who thought getting 32 million more people covered by health insurance would ease ER

Although people are living longer nowadays, older age is often accompanied with chronic illness and disabilities. According to a geriatric study done by Nursing Outlook, about 80% of people age 65 and older have at least 1 chronic illness such as heart disease, diabetes, or arthritis. Having to deal with hypertension, osteoporosis, and heart disease all at the same time is unimaginably difficult. These conditions affect their quality of life and also increase the need for their long-term care. Hospitals are going to find that a

With the United States population living longer and the Baby boomers retiring there is a shortage of providers and provider appointments to meet the needs of all patients. This along with

Primary care access is a growing concern for all Americans and the reason behind this concern is an imbalance between demand for care and capacity to provide care. Demand is growing as the population expands, ages, and faces chronic illnesses and the capacity is shrinking as the ration of primary care clinicians to population drops (Ghorob & Bodenheimer, 2012). A primary goal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to improve access to quality health care for uninsured Americans, largely through public and private insurance expansions (Polsky et al, 2015). At the same time, the architects of the law recognized the need to increase the availability of primary care providers to meet the increased demand for health care (Pg. 538, 2015).

The United States has been slow in addressing the need for an effective primary care health care system either due to special interest groups or the lack of a political “window of opportunity” to take on this challenge. In January 2000, an article in JAMA,

The Issue is that physician payments in Medicare and Medicaid, are already well below the prevailing rates in the private sector. On the average, physicians who take Medicare are paid 81 percent of private payment. Doctors who take Medicaid are paid 56 percent of private payment. This type of payment plan (Obamacare) has resulted in access problems for Medicare patients, and the even lower Medicaid payments have already caused serious access problems for lower-income people and made hospital emergency room overcrowded. During recent research study on the The Affordable Care Act they found that 67 percent of primary care physicians said that under current laws and conditions new Medicaid enrollees will not be able to find “suitable primary care

Regardless of the many factors influencing the supply of physicians such as movement away from managed care, increase in the number of female physicians, lifestyle preferences, population growth, and increase in average lifespan, there still continues to be a physician shortage here in the United States. In order to fill these available positions in doctors’ offices, hospitals, and clinics due to the physician shortage, we are using IMGs, or international medical graduates.

- There is a large physician aftercare population for referrals. Healthcare needs are high and there are four hospitals within a 15 mile radius leaving the need for more