Americans are increasingly waiting weeks or even months to get an appointment to see a health care specialist.
This delay comes at a time when the population of aging adults is rising dramatically. By 2050, the number of adults over 85 is expected to triple, which will intensify the strain on an already stretched health care system. We wrote about this worsening challenge and its implications for the health care workforce in a January report in the New England Journal of Medicine.
We are health care scholars who are acutely aware of the severe shortfall of specialists in America's health care system. One of us, Rochelle Walensky, witnessed the consequences of this shortage firsthand as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from January 2020 to June 2023, during the critical early years of the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the physician and overall health care workforce shortage to the forefront. Amid the excess daily deaths in the United States from COVID-19, many people died of potentially preventable deaths due to delayed care for heart attacks, deferred cancer screenings and overwhelmed emergency departments and intensive care units.
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