Will we have enough physicians? One of life's "unanswerable" questions.

What appears to be clear is that past studies and projections have produced highly variable and frequently contradictory responses and that past projections have sometimes not even been directionally correct. For example, in the 1970s there was concern that the United States was facing an imminent shortage of physicians. This led to a push to expand the number of both medical schools and students enrolled in existing schools, which resulted in a 66% increase in the number of medical students between 1970 and 1984. A decade later, the conventional wisdom was that the country was facing an oversupply of physicians as a result of the growth in managed care.1