Health care has a serious supply and demand problem when it comes to physicians.
This isn’t a particularly new problem, but it is becoming harder to ignore as the U.S. population ages—bringing a growing share of our physicians closer to retirement as more people demand their services.
The population aged 65 and older is projected to grow by 34.1 percent by 2036, while the population aged 75 and older is projected to grow by 54.7 percent, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Seniors tend to use more health care services than their younger counterparts, requiring more surgical visits and check-ups for chronic conditions.
The Baby Boomer population will place unprecedented strain on health systems in the coming decade, and they’ll be the first generation to face such a severe doctor shortfall. This year, the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis anticipates a shortage of 57,259 physicians in the U.S. That number is expected to grow to 81,180 by 2035.
The growing, aging population is the primary driver of this shortage, according to a recent report from AMN Healthcare, an industry staffing company. But the aging physician population is poised to exacerbate the problem—a dilemma that AMN has dubbed the “physician retirement cliff.”
More than three in 10 doctors actively caring for patients are aged 60 or older, and two in 10 are 65 or older. Some specialties are facing an even steeper drop-off. In pulmonology, for example, 73 percent of physicians are 55 or older.
At AdventHealth—a 55-hospital system spanning nine states, headquartered in Florida—nearly 20 percent of the physician workforce is over 60, and many are working well into their 70s, Dr. Michael Cacciatore, the system’s executive vice president and chief clinical officer, told Newsweek. To ensure these physicians are “working well and that they are well,” AdventHealth has implemented cognitive testing as part of the re-credentialing process for older doctors, as well as a tactile requirement for surgeons.
The health system also offers part-time positions and mentorship roles to retirement-age physicians, aiming to preserve their wisdom for incoming physicians, Cacciatore said. It is also zeroing in on wellness initiatives, technological integrations and enhanced residency training programs to become an attractive employer for all generations. (The health system was recently named to Newsweek’s 2025 ranking of America’s Most Admired Workplaces.)
Still, Cacciatore and other industry leaders expressed concern about the rapidly approaching physician retirement cliff.
“When you look at retirements and you look at the number of residents coming in yearly,” Cacciatore told Newsweek, “it’s clear that the physician shortage is not going away anytime soon.”
And it’s not like the problem is springing up out of nowhere, either.
“These numbers have been coming out for years and years, that we were going to find ourselves in a very difficult place where we had more physicians exiting the practice versus coming in,” Jeff Decker, division president of AMN Healthcare’s physician and leadership solutions business, told Newsweek.
“What’s happening, though, is the reality of how fast it’s coming,” he continued. “It’s now getting to that place where we’re finding it to be a bit more alarming.”
If this 80,000 doctor-sized dilemma didn’t creep up on us, then why haven’t we solved it already? Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as hiring more doctors. American medical schools actually hit a new enrollment high in the 2024-2025 academic year, nearing 100,000 students for the first time on record. Enrollment rose 1.8 percent from the previous year, and has been increasing for the past decade, according to the AAMC.
Still, medical schools cannot train physicians quickly enough to meet the rising demand. And they can’t just admit more. Medicare funding for residency training was capped by the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, which limited the number of residents that hospitals could afford to take on. Between 1987 and 1997, the number of residents in training grew 20.6 percent. Between 1997 and 2007—the decade after the Balanced Budget Act—that growth rate had shrunk to 8 percent.
Meanwhile, the way we use health care services has changed. Health spending has accelerated year over year, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. In 2023, the annual per-person health spend reached $14,570, up from $2,151 in 1970 when adjusted for inflation. More than a fifth of U.S. adults take at least five prescription drugs as chronic disease becomes increasingly prevalent, the CDC reports.
“A healthier population would certainly be a step in the right direction,” Decker said, “but that’s not going to [improve] fast enough to take care of the burden on the system itself.”
How do health systems plan to replace retiring doctors?
Artificial intelligence and other technological innovations, like telehealth, are promising tools that can alleviate some of the administrative burden on physicians, Decker added.
The rise of advanced practice providers (APPs), like nurse practitioners and physician assistants, are also easing the pressure in some specialties. These providers can help take care of less acute patients so physicians can focus on more severe cases. APP degrees are also less expensive and time-intensive than MDs, so they could provide a favorable alternative. It’s important to continue promoting the stability and pay that health care careers can provide, encouraging more people to explore them, according to Decker. Pipeline programs around the country are working to introduce students to medical careers as early as middle school.
Still, health care professionals—nurses, APPs and physicians alike—report unprecedented levels of burnout. The number of physicians working locum tenens has increased 97 percent since 2015, and while the arrangement gives them more control over their schedules, it can place additional strain on staff doctors (and hospital budgets).
In general, doctors want to work differently nowadays, Decker said: They want that coveted work-life balance. Nearly 60 percent of medical students do not plan to work in patient care, according to a 2023 survey from Elsevier—and a quarter of U.S. medical students said they were planning to quit their studies entirely.
Dr. Harry Severance, a member of the board of directors at Duke University School of Medicine’s Collaborative Cardiovascular Society and Research Network and a member of the Tennessee Medical Association’s wellbeing committee, told Newsweek that many prospective physicians are realizing they can find better pay and hours—and more respect—in other professions.
When he goes to meetings and conferences, Severance says he hears “bright young minds” discussing how they can improve the health care system. But some pivot when they’re exposed to the dangerous realities of their chosen career. Health care workers suffer five times more violence than any other industry, and 91 percent of emergency doctors say that they or a colleague were a victim of violence in the previous year, according to a January poll from the American College of Emergency Physicians.
“You can recruit people in, but after a while—especially younger, more flexible people—they’re going to turn around and leave,” Severance said. “Why should they put up with all this abuse when they’ve got alternatives?”
Medicine has always been demanding, but nowadays, the work doesn’t yield the same reward, he added. AMN Healthcare reports that three quarters of today’s physicians are employed by a hospital, medical group or other entity. They are much less likely to run their own practices, and therefore would be less autonomous.
“When we became attending physicians in the 20th century, doctors basically ran the hospital,” Severance said. “You put up with all of that [medical school], and now you can set your own rules. You can do what you think is right. You can make the system what it ought to be.”
“Well today, that’s all gone,” he continued. “[Physicians] become employees in a meat-grinding system.”
Can today’s health systems retain or attract talent?
Retired physicians who spoke with Newsweek expressed similar concerns about the changing health care industry.
Dr. Peter Grape began practicing cardiology in 1984 in Massachusetts. He started in a private practice with two other cardiologists, and assumed the CEO role as more physicians joined. Over the next 30 years, the practice grew to include 70 physicians across multiple specialties, along with other services, like laboratory and imaging.
In 2015, he sold the practice to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, but remained at the head of it until he retired in April 2024. He told Newsweek that many physicians grew dissatisfied as insurance companies and health systems increased oversight of patient care—requiring more forms and records at the expense of face time with patients.
“When we first started, there was very little regulation in medicine,” Grape said. “That’s good and bad, but we were able to do what we wanted to. We could see patients without having to get any kind of preauthorization.”
Like Severance, Grape recalls working “extraordinarily hard”—clocking 12-hour days to care for patients and grow his practice. But as medicine has become more corporatized, physicians have less say in the direction of their work and distribution of their time.
As that gratification waned, it became harder to recruit and retain physicians, especially in specialties like primary care, Grape said. In today’s medical system, it is more challenging for physicians to exercise personal agency and maintain meaningful patient connections. That has made the career less desirable to many medical professionals—across all age groups—who prioritize those attributes.
Dr. Laura Jett, a family medicine physician, was recently forced to retire early due to health complications. But throughout her career, she worked in a variety of settings: from independent practices to large health systems, from Ohio to the East Coast.
Jett, too, recalls a time when health care felt less rigid. She told Newsweek that in the later portion of her career, working for a major medical system, she had less freedom to take charge or adjust her leadership style to fit the circumstances.
“We have to have standardized clinical practices and quality measures,” Jett said. “But when it comes to actual day-to-day functioning, there needs to be some variation allowed. If everyone has to follow the same template, it’s going to fail if it doesn’t apply to the particulars of the region, the patients, the staff and the providers in that particular office setting.”
When doctors are working at such high capacities, they also have less time to collaborate on patient cases. Reflecting on that sense of community and camaraderie that care teams used to share, Jett said, “It feels like we’ve lost something.”
Retaining physicians who are on the brink of retirement—even in a part-time capacity, working in telehealth roles or as mentors—will be crucial to weathering the provider shortage, AMN’s Decker said. But as practicing physicians told Newsweek, the current system is not a welcoming one.
Since retiring, “I’ve had time to think about what it means to be a doctor,” Jett said. “What is the service? What do we do with our lives? Nothing but work.”
“It’s a tremendous offering,” she continued. “It’s devalued a lot. The mechanization or the industrialization of the medical practices, the delivery of health care, diminishes that sense of feeling like you’re valued. I did notice that [colleagues] started to close up and become siloed.”
There’s not a clear-cut solution to the physician retirement cliff. Expanding the workforce and fine-tuning technology will take years. In the meantime, experts told Newsweek, health care organizations must make incremental changes to improve the conditions at their workplaces for both new and experienced physicians.
Many stakeholders are fighting for a slice of the health care market, taking bigger chunks of profit because they believe the system will always right itself, Severance said. Meanwhile, the pillars that keep the system standing—its providers and physicians—are beginning to wobble.
“Nobody can imagine this country without an intact health care system,” he said. “And for that very reason, nobody’s got their eyes on the ball. And for that very reason, it could collapse.”
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