A new study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that nearly 5% of U.S. physicians left clinical practice in 2019, representing a 40% increase in just six years.
It confirms what every practicing doctor already knows: America’s physicians are burning out, checking out, and getting out, with female physicians and those in rural areas being the most likely to exit.
The study, conducted by Rotenstein and colleagues from Yale, UCLA, and UCSF, examined over 700,000 physicians who treated Medicare patients and found that doctors caring for older, sicker, and poorer patients were more likely to leave the profession. Although the paper is descriptive rather than prescriptive, the message is clear -- the medical profession is hemorrhaging.
Medicine has become the only profession where the customer isn’t the patient, the boss isn’t the doctor, and the computer always wins.
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The reasons for this mass departure aren’t mysterious; they’re baked into the system.
For many doctors, it’s death by a thousand clicks. The modern doctor’s day is no longer defined by caring for patients but about feeding the bureaucratic beast. Electronic health records were promoted as time-savers, but they quickly became time thieves.
For every hour of patient care, physicians spend nearly two hours on documentation and desk work. None of it enhances health care, but all of it keeps lawyers and administrators satisfied. Sacrificed are evenings with family, replaced by late-night charting marathons to satisfy billing requirements.
Then there’s malpractice anxiety, the ever-present sword of Damocles. Roughly one in three physicians has faced a lawsuit at some point in their career. Even in states with tort reform, a single bad outcome or an opportunistic attorney can bring years of stress and financial burden.
