AIDS specialist leaves Calif. practice, citing rising costs

A long-time San Francisco AIDS specialist is closing his clinic and moving to Manhattan because of frustration with the insurance industry and the rising cost of practicing medicine, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. "The bottom line is, you cannot make a living practicing medicine unless you work at least 50 to 60 hours a week," said Dr. Marcus Conant, one of the first AIDS doctors in the area. "I'm not the only doctor who's getting to the point where it's not worth it."

The Chronicle writes, "He has been a physician for nearly 50 years, but like many doctors, in the past decade he has become increasingly frustrated with insurance challenges that made running a private practice unnecessarily complicated and a financial nightmare, he said. He tried to run his practice part time, using his personal savings to keep the clinic open." In New York, he is working with researchers examining a virus that is possibly linked to chronic fatigue syndrome and autism (Allday, 6/22).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.