My niece Jenny is an intelligent high school student who wants to pursue her career as a doctor. She has emailed me asking for advice on whether or not to become a medical doctor and where the best location would be to do her practice. She wants to make sure this will be the best decision for her, and understands how high the cost of tuition is going to be along with the amount of time it takes to put into this type of career path. From taking the course in Business Economics, I recognize the significance of such a career path decision for my niece. I will need to help identify and quantify the total opportunity costs of her decision. I need to educate myself about the type of marker currently for physicians in terms of supply and demand, costs of production, pricing, elasticity, and normal profit. The following will let me help her make the right career decisions.
The type of projections for physicians was put into 4 different categories, primary care, medical specialties, surgical specialties, and other specialties. This would be one direction my niece would have to decide her focus after seeing the results. There are multiple studies done in the career world that show where there is a demand and where there is a shortage, the study reflects where the shortage would be for physicians specifically. As the supply for physicians continues to grow, the demand for them is growing faster. The physician supply is projected to increase until 2025; the demand will grow more steeply. The total demand is projected to grow up by 17%. By 2025, the demand for physicians will exceed supply by a range of 46,000 to 90,000 (AAMC 2018).
To understand the trends in any physician service market it is necessary to understand the nature of both supply and demand but few studies have jointly examined supply and demand in these markets (Hubbard 2018). The estimated price elasticity of demand of -0.19 is comparable with other studies is in the conventional range. The slope of the demand will regulate the changes in the demand of physicians. If the demand curve is more elastic then a rise in fees will result in a huge reduction in demand of physicians. All of this will be dependent upon how quickly the population is growing and how quickly the population is aging (AMA 2018).
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The numerous amounts of medical schools, facilities that allow these practices, enrollment ratios, etc., are all different things that will affect the supply of a physician. There were 789,200 active physicians in the market and by keeping factors and the inputs the same; it shows that the supply should increase by 10% by 2025 to hit 869,900 (AMA 2018).
The doctor demand is high, but the education behind becoming a physician is what will take the most time and effort to become the doctor that is needed. Along with time and effort, it costs quite a bit of money to finish. The median debt is between $170,000 and $200,000 for 84% of a graduating class in 2014. 4 year public school tuition was around $226,447 and for private to be $298,538 (Doctorly 2018). Just like any school or job, the type of location that is chosen will affect the amount that tuition will cost.
If Jenny decided she wanted to go to a public medical school, it will cost a lot less money than if she decided she wanted to attended a private school. Regardless of the type of school she chooses, it is going to take up a lot of time and money until she is officially a specialized medical doctor. But overall, it will be worth it in the future. The salary of a doctor will pay off on its own. While student debt can be tough, once a student graduates, they have the option to push back loan payments, the only downfall is, the interest does not stop on these payments at all (Doctorly 2018).
Working long hours, and having most of the time spent in hospitals, it can be difficult trying to spend time with families. It can make it seem like pursuing this type of career and future, balancing a social life and a work life could be difficult. Going through medical school, and the long, hard hours that are put into clinical can lead up to having high stress levels. Physicians that are younger than the age of 35, more than 50% of them feel burned out from the stress level it causes.
Overall, my advice for Jenny would be to think long and hard about this decision. There will be lot of time and effort spent into being a physician. But the demand for them will always be open. The investment for this career is also very high, but they have multiple options for repayment plans. In the long run, the return of investment will be much higher than the amount put in.
References
- AAMC. (n.d.). Retrieved July 29, 2018, from http://www.aamc.org/
- American Medical Association | AMA. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.ama-assn.org/
- CDC – NCHS – National Center for Health Statistics. (2018, July 26). Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/
- Cost vs Reward of Becoming a Doctor – Doctorly.org. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://doctorly.org/cost-vs-reward-of-becoming-a-physician/
- Hubbard, G. P., & O’Brien, A. P. (2014). Economics, 5th Edition. [Vitalsource]. Retrieved July
