Anyone who has been to a hospital emergency room lately has seen firsthand the health care crisis that we are facing in this country.
ERs routinely are filled beyond capacity, with patients lying on their hospital beds in corridors while they wait for a room to open up — sometimes for days.
And during the respiratory illness season, when seniors and young children flood the ERs, our overcrowded hospitals resemble something out of a developing country, rather than what is supposedly the most advanced healthcare system in the world.
The statistics tell a bleak tale: The U.S. has less than three hospital beds per 1,000 residents, while the European Union has more than five and Japan almost 13. On average, 75% of America’s hospital beds are occupied on any given day, 11 points higher than in 2019.
In Boston’s hospitals, the daily occupancy rate reportedly is 86%. According to some experts, the system becomes overloaded when the occupancy rate reaches 85%.
We grew up in a time (the 1960s-70s) when just about every city and town in Massachusetts had its own hospital, institutions that were the pride of their communities. But starting in the 1970s, thanks to a combination of declining reimbursement rates from state and federal governments and surging costs for modern-day equipment (such as MRI machines) and treatment, community hospitals one-by-one began to disappear, leaving us in our present predicament of too few hospitals serving too many people.
Another looming crisis in our healthcare system is a shortage of doctors. It is estimated that there are 1,010,892 active physicians in the U.S., of whom 851,282 are direct patient care physicians. (Physicians who do research or are administrators represent the difference between the two numbers.)
Anyone whose primary care doctor recently has retired knows how difficult it is today to find a new doctor. But this shortfall is only going to get worse over the next decade. By 2037, the United States is expected to face a shortage of 187,130 physicians, including 87,150 primary care physicians.
It is estimated that there already are 75 million Americans who live in areas where it is difficult to get access to primary care — and the ratio of primary care providers is projected to decline to 76.8 per 100,000 people by 2037, from 81.6 per 100,000 in 2022.
To make matters worse, the present — and future — shortfalls in hospital beds and doctors do not take into account the effects of the policies in Washington that are threatening to cut back on Medicaid eligibility, to reduce Medicare reimbursements even further, to limit the loan programs available to medical school students, and to restrict (if not prevent) foreign-born doctors from coming into this country.
In short, all of the ingredients are in place to create the Perfect Storm for a healthcare crisis in our nation.