1. 'Good Luck Getting an Appointment'
Patients feeling a cold creeping up shouldn't wait too long to call their primary-care physician since there's probably already a long line of patients waiting to see him or her.
A good primary-care doctor -- someone to coordinate your health care, help choose your specialists, and be the first to diagnose just about any problem -- is the key to good medical treatment. But they're getting harder to visit. Twenty-three percent of patients say they waited six or more days to see their physician the last time they were sick and needed to see a doctor, according to a 2008 survey by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that promotes high-performing health-care systems. The longer wait in part is attributed to the slow-growing profession of primary-care physicians, which includes family medicine, general practice and internal medicine doctors. Currently, just a third of all doctors in the U.S., are primary care physicians, about 240,713 in total, up from 200,862 five years ago. "We're not really getting the best and brightest in primary care," says Kevin Pho, a Nashua, N.H., physician who writes the blog Kevin M.D. "And that's where they're needed."
Patients feeling a cold creeping up shouldn't wait too long to call their primary-care physician since there's probably already a long line of patients waiting to see him or her.
A good primary-care doctor -- someone to coordinate your health care, help choose your specialists, and be the first to diagnose just about any problem -- is the key to good medical treatment. But they're getting harder to visit. Twenty-three percent of patients say they waited six or more days to see their physician the last time they were sick and needed to see a doctor, according to a 2008 survey by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that promotes high-performing health-care systems. The longer wait in part is attributed to the slow-growing profession of primary-care physicians, which includes family medicine, general practice and internal medicine doctors. Currently, just a third of all doctors in the U.S., are primary care physicians, about 240,713 in total, up from 200,862 five years ago. "We're not really getting the best and brightest in primary care," says Kevin Pho, a Nashua, N.H., physician who writes the blog Kevin M.D. "And that's where they're needed."
