Week 8: Burnout

This week I continued working at the office and spent a good amount of time thinking about something that has been building in the back of my mind all semester. We talk a lot about reimbursement rates and operating costs, but there is a human side to all of this that does not get enough attention. The financial pressure on doctors does not just hurt their bank accounts. It feeds into a much bigger problem called physician burnout, and that burnout eventually trickles down to the patients who need care the most.

According to a 2024 report by Horstman from the Commonwealth Fund, nearly half of all primary care physicians in the United States report feeling burned out. Of those burned out physicians, 39% said they plan to stop seeing patients entirely within the next one to three years (Horstman, 2024). On top of that, 86% of burned out physicians said their job is extremely or very stressful, and 81% reported being dissatisfied with practicing medicine. The article also points out that by 2036 the US is estimated to face a shortage of 68,020 primary care physicians, which is a direct consequence of burnout driving doctors out of the field. For patients, especially kids in Medicaid dependent communities like Brighton Beach, that shortage is not an abstract statistic. It means longer wait times, fewer options, and in some cases no doctor at all.

But what I think gets overlooked in this conversation is how early the burnout actually starts. Before a doctor even sees their first patient, they have already been grinding for years. To be competitive for medical school today, students need near perfect GPAs, strong MCAT scores, hundreds of hours of volunteering, hundreds of hours of clinical shadowing, and research experience on top of all of that. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), in the 2024-25 cycle, 51,946 people applied to medical school and only 23,048 actually got in (Boyle, 2025). That means more than half of all applicants, after years of preparing, still did not get a seat. The average accepted student had a GPA of 3.86 and an MCAT score of 512, and cumulatively performed over 709 hours of community service. And that is just to get in. The competition only intensifies during residency in the US, where according to the AAMC’s 2025 Survey of Resident/Fellow Stipends, first year residents earn an average of only $67,899 per year despite regularly working 60 to 80 hours per week. Add in hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical school debt, with the most expensive programs now exceeding $100,000 a year in tuition alone according to the Education Data Initiative, and it starts to become clear why so many doctors hit a wall.

The financial structure of how we pay doctors is not just a business problem. It is a patient access problem, and it starts much earlier than most people realize.

Thanks for reading, see you in the next one!

Horstman, C. (2024). A Poor Prognosis: More Than One-Third of Burned-Out U.S. Primary Care Physicians Plan to Stop Seeing Patients. Commonwealthfund.org. https://doi.org/10.26099/EVWB-8T35

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Boyle, P. (2025). Medical school enrollment reaches a new high. AAMC. https://www.aamc.org/news/medical-school-enrollment-reaches-new-high

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