Complexities of Physician Workforce Projection: Call for a Unified National Healthcare Workforce Policy

Abstract

Ensuring an adequate supply of physicians is paramount in securing the future of healthcare. To do so, accurate physician workforce predictions are needed to inform policymakers. However, the United States lacks such predictions from reliable sources. Several non-governmental organizations have actively been involved in attempting to quantify workforce needs, but they often employ opaque methodologies and are deeply conflicted, leading to potentially unreliable or biased results. Moreover, while federal and state entities invest approximately $15 billion annually in graduate medical education (GME) payments, they have very little control over how the funding is used to shape the future physician workforce. In this article, we review physician workforce predictions from both an international and a domestic perspective and finally discuss how the creation of an apolitical, data-driven, expert-led panel at the federal level with sufficient authority to influence broader workforce policy is the optimal solution for ensuring an adequate supply of physicians for generations to come.