Analyzing Market Competition and the Primary Care Crisis

This paper examines the structural disequilibrium within the United States healthcare market, specifically analyzing the conditions of perfect competition across various medical specialties and the escalating primary care physician shortage.By comparing the economic characteristics of elective, consumer driven specialties (e.g., plastic surgery, dermatology) against insurance dependent, non elective fields (e.g., oncology, emergency medicine), the analysis demonstrates severe market failures driven by information asymmetry, high barriers to entry, and third party payer interference. Furthermore,this research highlights the geographical disparities in physician supply, comparing high density population centers (e.g.,California, Texas, New York) against rural regions (e.g., Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska). The findings suggest that the current primary care shortage is a predictable outcome of artificial regulatory constraints such as federally capped Medicare residency funding and narrow insurance networks rather than a natural market phenomenon.