This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 16th, 2003.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There is a growing shortage of medical practitioners

to provide care for the United States, which we should note is an aging country,

and the medical profession itself is moving too slowly to address it.

Cato's Jeff Singer suggests that more states ought to be more like Missouri and a few others and allow so-called

assistant physicians to have a more prominent role. Singer explains how it works.

Let's start with a bit of taxonomy here, assistant physician, not the same thing as

physician's assistant.

Correct.

Assistant physician is a category or a term that was developed a few years ago by people in the policy world.

Some people also refer to it as associate physician.

And basically it's an apprentice physician.

Up until the early 20th century,

the most common way to prepare doctors for medical practice

after they graduate medical school is they'd be an apprentice with a practicing physician for a while

and then they'd go out on their own when they were felt ready.

What's been going on now is as more and more people are becoming aware,

there's a growing shortage of health care practitioners to provide primary care services to a growing and aging population in this country.

And we're talking about all kinds of primary health care providers,

from physician assistance to nurse practitioners to medical doctors and

evidences that a large number of them are actually retiring and there are not enough being produced to meet the needs of a growing population.

...