There are about 834,769 doctors in the United States. Of them, only 397,130 are primary care doctors (family doctors, internists, pediatricians, and obstetricians-gynecologists); the rest are subspecialists.

A little calculation, assuming everyone goes to the doctor, which is not true, suggests that there are about 800 patients per primary care doctor. That is about four times as many patients as a primary care physician can competently handle.

And it gets worse. The electronic medical record has served to further distance doctors from patients.

Pay attention to your interaction with the doctor. How often does he make eye contact with you? Doctors have to write notes in the computer, and if it’s an affluent practice where an assistant writes the notes, the privacy, the opportunity to have and develop a personal relationship with your doctor is even more remote.

Do you want to talk to your doctor about your sex life? Problems in your marriage? Stress at work?

You are more likely to just swallow hard, say something irrelevant, and get the hell out of the doctor’s office as fast as possible with a prescription you’re guaranteed to know very little about. That is today’s non-acute medical care and it is awful.

Maybe the primary care doctor shortage is due to physicians wanting to help patients but becoming so disappointed that they go into specialties in which they know they can make a living.

Or they decide to just get out of the insurance system that only cares about how the CEO of the insurance company can make billions of dollars while the doctor works with a clerk to make life or death medical decisions.

Why are the doctors turning on a system that treats them so badly? Wouldn’t you do the same?