144 - Primary Care Physicians Are Ghosting America — And It’s Not Even Halloween

We’re staring down a shortfall of over 87,000 primary care doctors by 2037 — and it’s already starting to feel like a vanishing act.

In this “Did You Know” episode, I’m unpacking what’s really behind the disappearing primary care workforce. It’s not just retirements — it’s burnout, broken systems, and a business model that’s pushing physicians to the edge (and out the door).

• Hear the real stats behind the shortage — and why they matter now, not later.
• Understand how we got here and what needs to change to make primary care sustainable again.
• Learn the paths forward — from direct care models to better contracts — so physicians can thrive, not just survive.

Hit play to find out why primary care is in crisis — and how you can help fix it without burning out or selling out.

Link to study on the shortage of primary care physicians in the United States -

https://bhw.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/bureau-health-workforce/state-of-the-primary-care-workforce-report-2024.pdf

 Discover how medical graduates, junior doctors, and young physicians can navigate residency training programs, surgical residency, and locum tenens to increase income, enjoy independent practice, decrease stress, achieve financial freedom, and retire early, while maintaining patient satisfaction and exploring physician side gigs to tackle medical school loans. 

Transcript

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Coach JPMD (00:00.17)
In today's episode, you're going to learn something that everyone should know about primary care doctors. Welcome back to another episode where I help younger physicians decrease stress and increase income by transitioning from corporate to independent practices, even without any business experience. In this episode, you're going to learn the staggering statistics on primary care and the shortages that we're facing in the United States, what the industry is doing in these cases of shortages.

and where I see things can improve if we all work together. Welcome to another episode of the Independent Physician's Blueprint where we help physicians decrease stress and generate wealth in this crazy world we're living in. And did you know that in 2037, there is a projected 87,150 full-time equivalent primary care physician shortage that is coming our way.

Yes, that's right. 87,000 physicians short. Yeah, that's right. A shortage of 87,000 physicians to care for the population in the United States. So I was reading an article about the state of primary care workforce. And this was a study created by the National Center for Healthcare Workforce Analysis.

And what they did was they identified the shortage of physicians and the projected shortage of physicians in the United States, where we currently have in 2022, there was 279,194 primary care physicians in the US. And at the same time, we also had 270,000 nurse practitioners delivering primary care and another 28,000 physician assistants.

And this shortage is, is related to the growing population of seniors, especially our Medicare, Medicare aged seniors who not only require primary care, but sometimes what would require require geriatric care. And there is a significant shortage. And so these numbers are staggering. And I think, you know, we need to address this in the United States.

Coach JPMD (02:13.004)
coupled with the fact that physicians are burning out. So we need to address this. And I think one of the ways of addressing this is to really highlight how physicians can care for their patients in the primary care setting and still make a great living. And so we talk about this in in the episode, in multiple episodes, in the podcast from direct primary care to Medicare advantage, risk contracting to,

Locum tenums and side gigs. So I encourage you to listen to those episodes so that we can help decrease the shortage of primary care physicians that we have in the US as an internist I find it very rewarding to care for patients over a long period of time been doing this for 25 but 24 24 25 years now and some patients I've actually taken care for 20 years and it's definitely rewarding to see

families grow and to see the relationships that I've from caring for patients. Yes, it's challenging. And maybe we're not making as much money as a neurosurgeon or an orthopedic surgeon, but we definitely do well when we know what we're doing in the business of medicine. So yeah, that's it. That's the episode of Did you know that we're in a massive shortage of primary care doctors in the United States and

We need to adjust it. See you next week.