AAFP’s CEO on how to keep primary care doctors in the field

In ten years, the United States could be short as many as 48,000 primary care doctors. The specialty is underpaid, to a point that doctors are lobbying Medicare to pay it extra. Even medical residents who chose the specialty are leaving primary care; some 45% of residents who planned to be generalists changed their mind during their residencies.

But R. Shawn Martin, the CEO of the American Academy of Family Physicians, the specialty trade group, isn’t worried.

“I’ve been around this and at this a long time and family medicine and primary care’s obituary has been written many times in my 25-plus years of doing this work,” he said with a laugh. “This isn’t the first time that primary care has been dying or fading away.”

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