Published in:
01-11-2019 | Addiction | Viewpoint
Physician Payment Disparities and Access to Services—a Look Across Specialties
Published in: Journal of General Internal Medicine | Issue 11/2019
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Much has been written about the shortage of primary care physicians.1 However, the supply and distribution of a whole range of specialties needed to care for an aging population raise similar concerns. Declining interest among trainees for certain specialties render potential disparities in access as an underappreciated issue in US health policy. Consider the following simple observation. Figure 1 shows the percent of counties in the USA that lack a single physician serving Medicare across a number of specialties, as well as the population in those counties. Relative to highly paid specialties, lower paid specialties are more likely to be absent in a county. While an outlier, the young but critically important specialty of addiction medicine, given the opioid epidemic, is currently absent in the vast majority of counties.
Figure 1
Counties without a specialist serving Medicare, by type of specialty. This graph maps the locations of all US physicians with any 2015 Medicare payment to the county of their billing. The percentage of the 3142 US counties that lacked a billing physician for each specialty is shown by the bar graph; the total population among those counties is shown by the red dots, connected by lines to facilitate comparisons of levels. Specialties were divided into lower paid and higher paid cohorts based on the Medscape Physician Compensation Report, 2015. Superscript letter “a” indicates data from Medicare Provider Utilization and Payment Data: Physician and Other Supplier, 2015. Superscript letter “b” indicates data from US Census Bureau Population Division, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2016. Figure 1 contains of poor quality of text.Do you want another version sent? I can have Sara send this
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