The United States could be short almost 28,000 surgeons by 2038, with the gap hitting vascular surgery, ophthalmology, thoracic surgery, and plastic surgery the hardest, according to a new nationwide study out of Case Western Reserve University. Researchers found the supply of surgeons is expected to drop by more than 4 percent over that period even as demand for surgical care climbs by more than 12 percent, leaving many patients — especially those in rural communities — with fewer options when they need an operation.
According to News Radio 1200 WOAI, the shortage is projected to total almost 28,000 surgeons nationwide by 2038. Vascular surgery is expected to be hit hardest of all, projected to meet only 65.8 percent of national demand by that year, followed by ophthalmology at 71.8 percent, thoracic surgery at 73.1 percent, and plastic surgery at 74.1 percent, as reported by Becker's ASC.
Not every specialty is facing the same squeeze. General surgery is projected to meet 91.3 percent of national demand by 2038, and colorectal surgery is expected to come close to full balance at 98.3 percent, according to reporting on the same study by RT — Respiratory Therapy. That contrast underscores a central finding of the research: the coming shortage is concentrated in narrow, highly trained subspecialties rather than spread evenly across surgical medicine.
How the Shortage Plays Out in Emergency Rooms
Dr. Amy Ho said patients sometimes end up in emergency rooms simply because they couldn't get appointments with the specialists they needed, and that some wait too long for procedures until a manageable problem becomes a true emergency. She said some emergency rooms don't have a surgeon available at all, forcing transfers to other hospitals — and per Ho, patients have waited days to be accepted elsewhere because hospitals are saturated in some cases. She pointed to patients in Kansas being transferred as far as New Mexico just to find an accepting hospital, calling the shortage an “endemic healthcare issue.”
The study relied on the Health Workforce Simulation Model, a federal projection framework built by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to analyze supply and demand across 10 surgical disciplines between 2023 and 2038, according to ThePrint. The project began when senior author Dr. Eliana Ferreira Ribeiro Duraes, a plastic surgeon at Cleveland Clinic, started examining workforce deficits in her own specialty alongside lead author Fernando Ribeiro Duraes, per RT's report. Fernando Ribeiro Duraes is credited as the study's author in the WOAI report, and researchers reportedly noted that earlier studies had only looked at specialties in isolation, missing the fuller picture this project set out to capture.
A Training Bottleneck Nearly Three Decades in the Making
The roots of the shortage trace back to 1997, when the Balanced Budget Act capped Medicare funding for new physician residency positions — a freeze that has held even as the U.S. population aged and surgical demand grew, according to the American Medical Association. Because Medicare remains the primary federal funder of graduate medical training, that cap has acted as a bottleneck limiting how many new surgeons the system can produce each year.
Congress is weighing a fix. H.R. 3890, the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act, is progressing through Congress and could help curb the shortage by raising the number of resident surgeons in training, per WOAI's reporting. The bill would create 14,000 new Medicare-funded residency positions over seven years, adding 2,000 slots annually from 2026 through 2032, according to the American Hospital Association. At least 10 percent of those new slots would have to go to hospitals in designated rural communities, according to legislative analysis reported by the AMA — a provision aimed squarely at the geographic gaps Ho described, since surgeon shortages are greater in rural areas.
The bill also proposes removing federal caps on student loans and could offer loan forgiveness programs, according to WOAI. Ho said reducing or eliminating those financial pressures could make more people likely to pursue surgery, especially the surgical subspecialties facing the steepest projected gaps.
Where the National Numbers Fit
The Case Western findings sit inside a larger, already-documented crisis. The Association of American Medical Colleges projected in March 2024 that the overall U.S. physician shortage could reach up to 86,000 doctors by 2036, with surgical subspecialties accounting for as much as 19,900 of that total shortfall, per the Association of American Medical Colleges. Separately, federal lawmakers have introduced the Ensuring Access to General Surgery Act of 2026, directing the Health Resources and Services Administration to build a standardized method for mapping general surgery shortage areas nationwide, according to News-Medical.
States aren't waiting on Washington to act. Texas enacted House Bill 2038, known as the DOCTOR Act, in 2025 to create streamlined licensing pathways for foreign-trained physicians after state health officials warned Texas could face a deficit of more than 10,000 physicians by 2032, according to The Texas Tribune. Hoodline has covered Texas's medical school expansion as part of that same statewide push to close the gap before it widens further.
