The American Medical Association is calling on Congress and the public health bureaucracy to tackle the "insidious crisis" of physician burnout that is leading to an ever-growing national physician shortage.

"The physician shortage that we have long feared — and warned was on the horizon — is already here," said AMA President Jesse Ehrenfeld in a press briefing on Wednesday. "It’s an urgent crisis … hitting every corner of this country — urban and rural — with the most direct impacting hitting families with high needs and limited means."

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Ehrenfeld, 44, began his one-year term as the 178th AMA president in June, and he is among the youngest presidents in the organization's history.

According to a joint survey conducted by the AMA, Mayo Clinic, and Stanford Medicine, nearly two thirds of doctors admitted to experiencing pandemic-related burnout, and one-fifth said they intended to leave medicine within the next two years.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a report on Tuesday that found nearly half of all healthcare workers, including physicians, reported feeling burned out in 2022.

Reports of harassment from patients and coworkers, ranging from verbal abuse to violent threats, also more than doubled from 6% to 13% between 2018 and 2022.

Although the study also found that 53% of healthcare workers reported symptoms of anxiety, those who had experienced harassment reported significantly higher rates of anxiety and depression symptoms.

Ehrenfeld opened his speech with a personal anecdote of a friend and colleague "who felt the weight of the pandemic on his shoulders" while working as an emergency room physician in California and took his own life due to resultant depression and anxiety.

"This is a picture of our healthcare system in 2023, and it is not a happy or uplifting one," said Ehrenfeld. "Physicians everywhere — across every state and specialty — continue to carry tremendous burdens that have us frustrated, burned out, abandoning hope and, in increasingly worrying numbers, turning our backs on the profession we’ve dedicated our lives to."

Ehrenfeld's top legislative priority before the end of the year increasing Medicare reimbursements, which have dropped by 26% since 2001 when adjusted for inflation.

"I don’t know many businesses in any industry that could withstand a 26% drop in revenue and still survive," said Ehrenfeld. "Meanwhile, we’ve seen high inflation, rising personnel costs, and increased practice costs that exacerbate these payment cuts."

Independent primary care physicians have faced significant financial difficulties in recent years, with only 25% of physicians being primary care physicians as of 2023. Many private practices have closed not only due to reimbursement rates but also due to the inability to keep up with administrative overhead.

On average, physicians spend twice as much time with paperwork than they do with patients, creating significant backlogs in care.

"[W]hen doctors lack the resources they need to keep their practices open, they close their offices. Or they reduce their hours. Or they make do with antiquated technology and equipment or fewer support staff. Or they limit the number of new Medicare patients they take, or stop seeing Medicare patients altogether," said Ehrenfeld.

Although physicians cannot legally walk off the job, other unionized healthcare workers, including nurses and other supportive care staff across the country, have engaged in strikes. This includes the Kaiser Permanente strike, during which over 70,000 providers staged the largest healthcare strike in US history across five states.

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In addition to the legislative priorities of the AMA, public health officials at the CDC have stressed the need for hospital administrators to address the issue of burnout and administrative burden on physicians.

"While usually health workers care diligently for others in their time of need, it is now our nation’s health workers who are suffering, and we must act,” said CDC's Chief Medical Officer Debra Houry.