Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.

Quick announcement, I will be doing a live event on Sunday, November 2nd in Washington, D.C.

at 6th and I, which is a great room, if you've never been.

I will be in conversation with Jeff Bennett of PBS News Hour,

celebrating 20 years of Freakonomics and talking about what's next.

Hope you can make it. For tickets, go to Freakonomics and talking about what's next. Hope you can make it.

For tickets, go to Freakonomics.com slash live shows.

And now here is today's episode.

Have you ever tried to make an appointment with your doctor and been told it would be weeks or even months before you could get in?

Or maybe you were referred to a specialist and it turned out that the nearest specialist isn't at all nearby?

One obvious cause of this problem is good old supply and demand.

We have around a million working physicians in the U.S.

or one for every 340 people. That is a much lower ratio than other high-income countries.

I'm telling you we're 180,000 doctors behind. It's not going to get us to where we need to be.

There are also mismatches in where physicians work. Some cities have a

surplus while some rural areas have a shortage. There are also mismatches when it comes to

specialties. Some places have plenty of cardiologists and oncologists and psychiatrists,

while others have very few. And how about the physicians themselves? How are they doing? We decided to

ask our listeners. My name is San Joidatta. I graduated Harvard Medical School in 1993, and I've been a

practicing general and bariatric surgeon since 2003. My job today is vastly different from when I started 20 plus years ago.

Operating room productivity and efficiency is much higher. I used to do two bariatric operations a day,

and now I do a minimum of five. With the electronic medical record replacing paper charts,

...