Added Incentive to Recruit Recruit Elder Care Specialists and Physicians

Fewer than 400 geriatricians a year emerge from academic training programs, partly for perceptual reasons (students see it as a depressing field, though its practitioners find it very satisfying) but partly for financial ones. With virtually all their patients on Medicare, geriatricians are the least paid of all medical specialists. They are actually penalized for their decision to care for old people. After three years as internal medicine residents, their income drops by $15,000 if they complete the fourth year of training required to become a geriatrician. More training equals even less money.

Geriatrics specialists, incredibly, are not included in the federal law governing eligibility for the National Health Service Corps. The National Health Service Corps offers a loan forgiveness program to help pay off the staggering debt that many health professionals, including physicians, incur as students. Established to increase the supply of primary care practitioners, the corps allows geriatrics specialists to participate for now because of an intervention of the secretary of health and human services. But unlike professionals in family and internal medicine, and in pediatrics, the inclusion of geriatrics specialists is recent and impermanent. A future secretary could bounce them.

The Eldercare Workforce Alliance has proposed a modification to add geriatrics specialists to the corps' governing legislation. It's a simple bill, just 29 words long including the title, the Caring for an Aging America Act. It requires no additional expenditures, though if it succeeds in drawing more people into service, Congress might eventually decide to increase the corps' appropriation.

Read the full article in the New York Times, or click here: http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/a-missed-opportunity-to-recruit-specialists-in-elder-care/?ref=health