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Because past predictions were so far off the mark, we need to understand why, before we can confidently predict the future supply of physicians.
AS RECENTLY AS 1980 the Graduate Medical Education National Advisory Committee (GMENAC) attempted to convince the nation of an impending physician oversupply, but failed. However, subsequent analyses supporting GMENAC's predictions persuaded virtually all of the nation's medical organizations, including the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), to sound alarms and adopt public positions advocating a decrease in the rate of physician supply. Now Richard Cooper and colleagues present a convincing argument to the contrary, predicting a serious, and growing, shortage of physicians. If nothing else, these conflicting reports make clear the extreme difficulty of projecting physician supply in the United States.
* GMENAC forecast. Established in 1976 to advise the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services about how well the projected supply of physicians would match expected requirements for physician services, GMENAC predicted in 1980 that the country would have an excess of approximately 145,000 physicians by the year 2000. However, GMENAC's report was widely criticized, largely because of perceived flaws in its mathematical modeling methods. As a result, neither the federal government nor the graduate medical education community accepted GMENAC's recommendations, and no steps were taken to curb physician supply.
* HMO model. In the early 1990s what was perceived as a more credible analysis came to virtually the same conclusion as GMENAC. Several physician workforce analysts began to use the physician staffing patterns of closed-panel health maintenance...
