The just of the story.....there's a couple of shifts occurring, and this end result is really starting to worry the medical profession and the authorities.
You've got the deal involving the new doctor generation.....going more toward female doctors in the system than males. Call it a trend, or simply the fact that there's more interest amongst younger female teen population now to be doctors. The issue that pops up is that they take time off for having kids. So there's man-hours lost somewhere in this business.
Then you've got an aging German doctor population.
Then you toss on the desire of German doctors to leave the country. Back around 2005....for a 12-18 month period, there were 5,000 German doctor's who deregistered and left Germany. They went to Canada, Australia, the US and various places where their profession was in demand and pay was better.
There's not exactly a real solution here. The smaller and more rural communities of Germany are facing a situation where fewer doctors are on hand. You end up with a clinic in your town and it takes fifteen days to get a routine appointment and three days to get an emergency appointment.
Toss in the problem with rising costs. Gaze over at the new fee system for Germans to pay a monthly "donation" to the health care program....just to keep it above water. You've got a spiraling downward situation that isn't easily fixed.
My guess is that you will start seeing more nurse practitioners....someone who gets a four-year degree in nursing and then performs fifty percent of what a doctor does. It's the only method that might keep costs in check and fix the doctor issue.
A lesser system in the future? Yeah, this might end up being a system that isn't quiet as good as it was in the 1990s. You might have folks who have an aliment and it gets missed by the nurse....until it's too late to help a guy. But there's not much of a way to fix the cost side of this whole issue.
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