Narrator:        This is Science Today. The average American spends about thirty minutes per year with a primary care physician. This falls short of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recommendation of 40 minutes per year for adults. Dr. Andrew Bindman of the University of California, San Francisco led a comparison study of primary care practice in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand.

Bindman:        They have many more primary care physicians per capita than we have here in the United States.
 

Narrator:        Bindman says part of the problem in the U.S. is a growing pay disparity between primary care doctors and specialists and fewer medical school students entering the field.

Bindman:        International studies have suggested that the degree to which a health care system invests in primary care is in fact an important predictor of how good the health care system works...So, while there's great interest and there's a lot of value in certain aspects of technology in the U.S. health care system,  I think that we have prioritized that to such a degree that we've kind of lost sight of what the main target here is, which is to keep our population healthy.

Narrator:        For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.