Increasing the number of primary ca...

Increasing the number of primary care physicians in the United States would provide better health consequences than letting market demand determine the number of subspecialists, according to sum of two units recent articles in Health Affairs. A consideration by Barbara Starfield, M.D., MPH of John Hopkins University educate of Public Health, Baltimore, and colleagues confirms the terminates of previous studies at state and other evens that found lower mortality rates in areas with more primary care physicians. The authors note that increasing the number of specialists likely will lead to greater disparities in health status and results between the United States and other industrialized countries. Robert Phillips Jr MD MSPH director of the Robert Graham Center in Washington, and colleagues agree that there is no benefit to adding more specialists to the physician workforce. In fact, they say, common efforts to satisfy demand for subspecialists actually may jeopardize public health. The article at Starfield, et al., is available online at http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.w5.97/DC1. The article at Phillips, et al., is available at http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.w5.111v1.

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