Will Minority Physician Supply Meet U.S. Needs?

Abstract

We project the future racial and ethnic composition of the U.S. physician workforce under different assumptions. Our projections show that reaching racial and ethnic population parity with a managed care-based requirement of 218 physicians per 100,000 population would require the number of first-year residents to roughly double for Hispanic and black physicians, triple for Native American physicians, and be reduced by about two-fifths for white physicians and two-thirds for physicians of Asian or Pacific Island origin.