Barriers To Entry For Doctors In The United States Essay

Barriers to Entry for Physicians in the United States

Introduction

Barriers to entry are the costs or other obstacles that prevent new competitors from easily entering an industry or area of business and they are found in all areas of the medical profession. There are barriers to entering the insurance market, to creating new hospitals, and even to becoming a doctor. The current barriers to entry that perspective physicians in the United States face are getting into medical school, shortage of medical residency programs, and licensure requirements. While some barriers exist in order to keep patients safe there are others that lead to the physician shortages that the United States is facing today. In order to address the problem head on it

In this time, it was very easy to become a doctor as there were almost no regulations. If you had the available capital, you could just open a practice and declare yourself a medical professional. This led to the predominance of the “non-physician” or someone who is not formally trained in medicine. As the understanding of medicine as a whole evolved universities began teaching and licensing their own physicians. Medical school classes were large, and universities had very high admission rates, while this allowed for a mass number of physicians in the market, medicine could be unreliable and at times unsafe. One of the major problems was that many of the universities were vastly different, they all had differing curriculum, standards for admission, and licensing requirements. This is when the American Medical Association was

These APs are designed to help in areas underserved by medical professionals, such as rural American. Missouri was the first of the states to begin a licensed role for assistant physicians, directly in response to the number of students not placed with a residency during the matching process. It is important to note that there is a difference between an assistant or associate physician and a physician’s assistant (PA). What sets AP’s apart is the fact that they must past the United States Medical Licensing Exams and have 2 more years of school before they begin practicing. Since the first steps taken by Missouri there have been four other states to establish similar programs. As it currently stands assistant physicians are able to enter a residency program after three years of practice under a supervising physician. In Missouri they proposed Missouri House Bill 550 which would grant assistant physicians the ability to become fully licensed after 5 years of supervised practice, but the bill died in committee in