Taking out academics, the answer is
IS WATER WET?
I love the shortage. The shorter the better. I want it to be even shorter than it is now. Bigger shortage, bigger leverage we have. I am part of a group and signed up for 120 hr per mo and can't get more than 140 hr a month per contract. That 120 hr is only 12 days a month. That leaves me many days to pick up locums shifts paying me 3x my reg pay and still have a lot of days off with the family. If I were single I would do 5 locums a month pulling in more than my reg job. I have to preface this that my locums is only 1 he drive away so I don't spend a full day traveling. Flying would make this much more difficult.
The bigger shortage, the more leverage I have to negotiate rates. I was offered 900/hr to cover Christmas holiday week but had family commitment. I could have made 60 k working Christmas week.
IMO the shortage will continue as long as FSEDs keep opening up. This is the biggest single driver of shortage in the. south. 1 FSED equals taking 5-6 full one ED doc out of the job pool.
This is the golden age of EM in my opinion. Who knows what's gonna happen in 5 yrs. I hope to milk his cow and retire in 5 yrs.
That 60k in one week is insane. The fact you decided to turn down 60k in one week because of family committments is also insane (in a good way lol). 900/hr to cover Christmas shows that currently EM docs have crazy leverage. Any other field of endeavor, if they want you to cover a holiday, it's going to be 99% stick and 1% carrot and go ahead and find yourself another job if you don't like it. Will this leverage exist in 7-8 years when today's premeds are attendings? Who knows. It's interesting to look at the data though.
In 2010 there were 35,000 EM docs according to the AAMC. Today there are probably close to 40k.
https://www.aamc.org/download/313228/data/2012physicianspecialtydatabook.pdf
Also, only a little over 30% of EM docs were 55 or older in 2010. I'd assume that number is basically unchanged today or maybe even slightly lower.This means retirement from the field is not going to play a very significant role in our calcultions.
There were 1821 EM residency spots in 2015, up from 1668 in 2012. Let's just assume over the next 8 years the average number of residency slots will be 2000. In that case, the total number of Emergency Physicians will have increased from 40,000 today to 56,000 in 8 years from now, an increase of 40%, assuming (an unreasonable) 0% retirement rate.
The population will have grown and become older/more sickly over this 8 year span, increasing demand for emergency room services. Some of this rise in demand will definitely be absorbed by increasing the utilization of midlevels in the ER. There is no way to plug real numbers here, but it doesn't seem that demand for Emergency Physician services will rise by a whopping 40% in 8 years to match the 40% increase in the number of emergency physicians. There will definitely still be a market and I highly doubt docs with geographic flexibility will struggle to find jobs, but $900/hr to cover Christmas reflects today's supply vs demand situation and probably won't be around when that supply inreases by 40%.
Disclaimer: I'm an idiot premed and this is all speculation backed by grade school level arithmetic. Needless to say, if I had any confidence in my ability to predict the future I wouldn't be typing this because I'd be homeless and without access to a computer, having lost everythign gambling on the stockmarket.