What a Physician Exodus Will Cost
What will a physician exodus cost us? More than the trillions spent on healthcare every year.
So long as they refuse to recognize the inherent worth of the people who make their own System run and continue to extract every ounce of time into more RVUs, this is what it will all cost.
Physicians keep leaving because we are asking for something simple, and nurses are striking for the same reason, proper compensation, safe ratios. We want something the System does not want to give. Expectations that match our actual reality. Responsibility that matches our actual capability.
Physicians are held to an excruciatingly high standard, legally and clinically, for outcomes we do not fully control. Fine. We accept that. We signed up for that.
But we are the only ones held to it. The staffing, the equipment, the administrative support our patients and we both actually need. None of that is held to the same standard. No one enforces exactness on the system. The enforcement is only on the people who choose to deliver the care. Not those who profit from it.
If expectations matched reality, and responsibility matched capability, we would happily stay. That is the ask. It has never been anything more complicated than that.
That ask will likely never be met. Here is what it will cost us instead.
Right now the complaint is, my doctor did not even listen to me. That is about to get much worse.
It is already turning into, I have never even seen my doctor. The segment of patients who cannot get in the door to even see their primary physician is growing, not shrinking.
Soon, it will be that there is no primary doctor at all. There will not be enough physicians left to have primary care physicians.
Everything will get pushed to a specialist. Right now the national average wait to see a specialist is 31 days. Some specialties run past 40. That is the floor as of today, before more of us leave. Expect the wait to grow.
There are costs beyond that. Costs that are more devastating than RVU extraction or several months of waiting to see a specialist. Costs that make anything else trivial by comparison. Costs I am uncomfortable naming here as they are the kind that live in group texts at 0200. If you are a physician reading this, you already know exactly what costs I mean, and you have your own version of that text.
That is what the System costs, and a glimpse of what it will cost next. Not us alone. All of us. Not just our time. Not just our health. Our humanity.
This is the third and final post in a series on physicians leaving medicine. You can read part one here and part two here.
This post was originally posted on LinkedIn, and you can read it here.