All too often these days, I find myself fidgeting by the doorway to my exam room, trying to conclude an office visit with one of my patients. When I look at my career at midlife, I realize that in many ways I have become the kind of doctor I never thought I’d be: impatient, occasionally indifferent, at times dismissive or paternalistic. Many of my colleagues are similarly struggling with the loss of their professional ideals.
It could be just a midlife crisis, but it occurs to me that my profession is in a sort of midlife crisis of its own. In the past four decades, American doctors have lost the status they used to enjoy. In the mid-20th century, physicians were the pillars of any community. If you were smart and sincere and ambitious, at the top of your class, there was nothing nobler or more rewarding that you could aspire to become.
Today medicine is just another profession, and doctors have become like everybody else: insecure, discontented and anxious about the future. In surveys, a majority of doctors express diminished enthusiasm for medicine and say they would discourage a friend or family member from entering the profession. In a 2008 survey of 12,000 physicians, only 6% described their morale as positive. Eighty-four percent said that their incomes were constant or decreasing. Most said they didn’t have enough time to spend with patients because of paperwork, and nearly half said they planned to reduce the number of patients they would see in the next three years or stop practicing altogether.
American doctors are suffering from a collective malaise. We strove, made sacrifices—and for what? For many of us, the job has become only that—a job.
That attitude isn’t just a problem for doctors. It hurts patients too.
In a survey of 12,000 physicians, only 6% described their morale as positive. Getty Images
Consider what one doctor had to say on Sermo, the online community of more than 270,000 physicians:
“I wouldn’t do it again, and it has nothing to do with the money. I get too little respect from patients, physician colleagues, and administrators, despite good clinical judgment, hard work, and compassion for my patients. Working up patients in the ER these days involves shotguning multiple unnecessary tests (everybody gets a CT!) despite the fact that we know they don’t need them, and being aware of the wastefulness of it all really sucks the love out of what you do. I feel like a pawn in a moneymaking game for hospital administrators. There are so many other ways I could have made my living and been more fulfilled. The sad part is we chose medicine because we thought it was worthwhile and noble, but from what I have seen in my short career, it is a charade.”
The discontent is alarming, but how did we get to this point? To some degree, doctors themselves are at fault.
In the halcyon days of the mid-20th century, American medicine was also in a golden age. Life expectancy increased sharply (from 65 years in 1940 to 71 years in 1970), aided by such triumphs of medical science as polio vaccination and heart-lung bypass. Doctors largely set their own hours and determined their own fees. Popular depictions of physicians (“Marcus Welby,” “General Hospital”) were overwhelmingly positive, almost heroic.
American doctors at midcentury were generally content with their circumstances. They were prospering under the private fee-for-service model, in which patients were covering costs out of pocket or through fledgling private insurance programs such as Blue Cross/Blue Shield. They could regulate fees based on a patient’s ability to pay and look like benefactors. They weren’t subordinated to bureaucratic hierarchy.
Read more from The Wall Street Journal: Five Things To Know Today.
After Medicare was introduced in 1965 as a social safety net for the elderly, doctors’ salaries actually increased as more people sought medical care. In 1940, in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars, the mean income for U.S. physicians was about $50,000. By 1970, it was close to $250,000—nearly six times the median household income.
But as doctors profited, they were increasingly perceived as bilking the system. Year after year, health-care spending grew faster than the U.S. economy as a whole. Meanwhile, reports of waste and fraud were rampant. A congressional investigation found that in 1974, surgeons performed 2.4 million unnecessary operations, costing nearly $4 billion and resulting in nearly 12,000 deaths. In 1969, the president of the New Haven County Medical Society warned his colleagues “to quit strangling the goose that can lay those golden eggs.”
