Will the Baby Boom Turn Out to Be a Health Care Bust?

The baby boom during the postwar period of about 1946–1964 has been likened to a demographic time bomb.

The strains placed on the health care system are expected to be enormous. According to a recent study by the Commonwealth Fund, more than 60% of adults aged 50–64 years who are working or have a working spouse have been diagnosed with at least one chronic health condition, such as arthritis, cancer, cardiovascular disease, or diabetes.

At the same time, the health care industry is suffering a manpower shortage. The Council on Graduate Medical Education says as the number of Americans ≥65 grows from 35 million in 2000 to 54 million in 2020, the deficit of physicians may reach 96,000.

Clearly, as the ranks of patients with diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease grow, specialists won't be able to care for everybody. Primary care must step up to the plate. But is it up to the task?

DOC News asked:

What will help primary care keep pace with the growing demands created by diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other conditions?

We need to educate the primary care doctors by giving them fairly explicit guidelines and encouraging organizations to hold people to those guidelines—to check to see that hypertension is controlled, that [glycated] hemoglobin (A1C) is controlled, that people with heart disease are on statins and other appropriate medications.

It's a difficult job, because doctors in the primary care setting are working under incredible time demands, trying to be jacks-of-all-trades to take care of a wide variety of diseases out there. It's a big job.

I'm skeptical that primary care doctors can do it, but we have to give them a chance. We don't have much choice.

James Felicetta, MD

Endocrinologist

Phoenix, Ariz.

We can't rely on the endocrinologists to take care of these patients because there are too few endocrinologists. The primary care physician is the one who is going to have to deal with [people with diabetes].

We've got to get the message out to the primary care physicians that they need to get their patients referred to diabetes education and take steps that are necessary for [patients] to lose weight and increase physical activity in order to help prevent those identified with prediabetes from going into full-blown type 2 diabetes.

Janine Freeman, RD, LD, CDE

Diabetes Educator

Atlanta, Ga.

TALK BACK: IS MEDICAL NEWS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH?

Medical journalism is a trade-off between explaining important findings and keeping the explanation simple enough to be understood by the typical reader. In the process, certain things go by the wayside out of necessity—caveats, qualifiers, and technical details that are meaningful to a researcher but less so to the lay public.

One recent survey of television news found that the typical medical story was only 33 seconds long and often contained information that was factually wrong and even potentially dangerous.¹ Another study found that newspaper and television reports often exaggerated the benefits of new drugs, ignored their risks, and failed to disclose costs.²

What do you think? Do we expect too much from the consumer press? How well does the media cover health and medicine?

Send your comments to docnews{at}diabetes.org.