Health care reform may benefit longer-term from greater incentives provided to physicians to enter the lower-paying realm of "primary care" vs. the current trend to "specialize"...It has long been recognized that the greater compensation is found by specializing and that few can afford to incur the debt required to make it through medical school and then choose the more modest income typically earned by the primary care physician. Therefore, there is a chronic shortage of primary care physicians that may be leading us to provide less preventative care which in turn may be by neglect causing health care concerns to become exacerbated over time into acute or chronic conditions that require the much more extensive and expensive care associated with forced referrals to the "specialist".
Therefore, based upon the premise that preventative care is less expensive than intensive care at the hands of the specialist, perhaps the people of the U.S. might consider a subsidy supporting the payment of the cost for medical school for anyone willing to commit to at least 10-years in primary care with specialists left to incur the debt much more easily repaid as an eventual specialist.
A more modest compensation package to provide cost-cutting preventative care without the weight of the student debt associated with the traditional entrance to the profession might just appeal to a great enough extent to remove a great deal of the cost from the system in the name of preventative medicine.
Viable? "Stomachable" by the voter? What do you think?
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