The Affordable Care Act, State Policies and Demand for Primary Care Physicians

The Affordable Care Act is designed to increase healthcare access nationwide. Such foreseeable new demand in the face of a fixed supply of physicians could lead to greater, and/or more intensive, recruitment of primary care physicians. We analyzed all primary care advertisements on three important national physician recruitment websites by ‘scraping' all content on two days one year apart and parsed the content using text analytic tools. We expected greater increases in recruitment activity in those states expanding Medicaid and which partnered with the federal government to construct insurance exchanges. Contrary to hypothesis, physician labor markets did not consistently respond to foreseeable increases in patient demand by increased recruitment activities