A survey released this week by the Physicians’ Foundation, a non-profit group of state medical societies and physician leaders, revealed that nearly half of all US primary care physicians want to stop practicing or reduce their patient loads. Primary care doctors include family practitioners, general internists, pediatricians and obstetricians/gynecologists.

The survey involving 11,950 primary care physicians found 79% of primary care physicians say they believe there is an existing shortage of primary care doctors in the United States. Also, 49 percent said they’d consider leaving medicine. Many of them admitted they are overwhelmed with their practices, not because they have too many patients, but because there’s too much red tape generated from insurance companies and government agencies.

“Tens of thousands of primary care doctors face the same problems as millions of ordinary citizens: frustrations in dealing with HMOs and government red tape,” Sandra Johnson, board member of the Physicians' Foundation, said in a statement.

About 66% of those surveyed said they were either working at "full capacity" or "overextended and overworked."

If these doctors stopped practicing, that could be devastating to the health care industry, Dr. Walker ray, vice president of the Physicians’ Foundation, believes.

“We couldn’t survive that. We are only producing in this country a thousand to two thousand primary doctors to replace them. Medical students are not choosing primary care.”

That crisis is closer than even taking into account that many medical students look away from primary care, according to a survey published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in September. Only 2 percent of those involved in the survey planned to pursue careers in general internal medicine. Back in 1990, a similar survey revealed that 9 percent of those interviewed would choose internal medicine.

There are many reasons for which medical students look away from primary care, starting with the long hours they have to work and the low pay they get for what they work. Many medical students are simply turned off by the amount of paperwork general internists have to deal with, a situation that doesn’t offer them a chance to a personal life. Many students today seek careers that offer them the chance to balance their work life with their personal life.

In fact the survey’s authors estimated at the time that the US will have 200,000 fewer doctors overall than it needs by 2020, while the number of older Americans is expected to nearly double between 2005 and 2030. This translates into a crisis, which could put the US medical system and people’s lives respectively in danger.

Maybe the new-elect president Barack Obama will finally make some changes in this field. He declared he would pay physicians extra so as to get them to spend more time with their patients. According to his campaign staff, his ideas would reduce spending in the health care sector with 8 percent and save $2,500 per tax payer.