In the next eight years, medical schools intend to increase enrollment in order to accommodate the medical needs of aging baby boomers and replace retiring doctors from that generation. But Shannon Brownlee, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, writes that adding more doctors does not necessarily mean better care.

The Association of American Medical Colleges, which advises the federal government on how many medical residents to support, says that the country will be 100,000 doctors short by 2025 unless the average number of medical-school graduates rises. Ms. Brownlee says more than 12 new medical schools are now being constructed or considered, and many existing schools are expanding, with a goal of increasing the number of graduates from 16,000 a year to 21,000 a year.

Some experts are saying, however, that many doctors are choosing their location based on patients' wealth and quality of life. Ms. Brownlee says that doctors are in control of how much care their patients receive and that when there is an influx of doctors in one area, they can still keep their schedules busy, creating unnecessary expenses for the patients and sometimes putting them at risk. This attraction to heavily insured areas makes for shortages in parts of the country where more people lack insurance, such as rural areas.

Ms. Brownlee points to other ways in which too many doctors can have an adverse effect on the quality of care and drive up costs. In hospitals that have a high ratio of specialists to primary-care physicians, for example, having different doctors for the same patient can lead to mishaps such as duplicate tests, unwise prescriptions, and mistaken assumptions about care, she writes. Medical schools are graduating more specialists and fewer primary-care doctors, a trend that she believes could make such problems worse. ...

For the complete article, visit The Chronicle of Higher Education Online, which previewed The Atlantic Monthly article.