the shortage is compounded by the lack of what is called pediatric subspecialists.se are the doctors that treat kids with more severe medical conditions. >> we have had great difficulty accessing -- having our patients access subspecialists in the last several years. >> reporter: while the standard wait for an appointment is two weeks, a sioux survey found children who need a pediatric subspecialist may wait seven times longer to see a doctor. there are so few specialists, some patients drive hundreds of mile just to get an appointment. >> the delays can be critical. sometimes a matter of life and death. >> reporter: take the case of 14-year-old mike johnston who suffered from debilitating headache for more than a year. the wait to see a neurological pediatrician was so long he ended up in the emergency room before the appointment ever arrived. he had a brain tumor. >> find out it is going to be two months or to find out you have to drive to another city to cut the wait for four weeks is really difficult for families and i think endangers kids. >> reporter: the wait

two weeks, a survey by the children's hospital association found children who need a pediatric subspecialisttimes longer to see a specialist. there is such a short annual, some patients drive hundreds of miles to see a specialist >> reporter: the delay can be critical. sometimes, a matter of life or death. take the case of 14-year-old michael job son who waited. he ended in the emergency room before the appointment ever arrived. he had a brain tumor. >> its find out if it's going to be two months or find out if you have to drive to another city to cut the wait to four weeks, that's dangerous. >> the wait time for pediatric neurology is nearly nine weeks. genetics, about 11 weeks and developmental pediatric more than 14 weeks for an appointment. nearly four months, that's the average with many more patients waiting even longer. >> you don't always know exactly what negative impact will be. so, oftentimes, the lack of things in their early years show up much later in life. >> reporter: you can think in part the killer debt for medical school. the machine medical association says that young doc

the shortage is compounded by the lack of what is called subspecialists. these are the doctors that treat kids with more severe medical conditions, kids like oswaldo sanchez. he has cerebral palsy. after undergoing surgery on his legs, it took four months to get into physical therapy. >> he is so determined to get around to walking, and -- faster help, he's probably going to walk by himself. >> we'll tell what you is behind the severe pediatrician shortage tonight on fox 5 news at 10. will? >> thank you, i'm just looking at the grass on the screen there. 45 degrees and what was the high today, it was hardly 50 degrees. >> nobody, i mean we just checked and it was not 50 anywhere. >> yeah. >> 49 for national and dulles, 46. >> we would have been talking about really, really raw outside. the sunshine and lighter winds helped us out a bit and listen, i think you should get used to this. it's 45 now and he was cheating a bit. culpeper, 37. we have the high, mid-level clouds and we'll have clouds this evening. the temperatures dropping out there and, again, it

i'm a subspecialist saying this, but i think there are other answers and also this idea that someone is dying every 19 minutes, we see the consequences. >> we got to go, your special coming up. we don't want to take any time out of that. >> you going to watch it? >> of course i'm gonna watch it. i'm don lemon with dr. sanjay gupta. here is his special. it begins right now. [ sirens ] >> code 3. >> this so drug overdose call. >> every 19 minutes in the united states, someone dies of an accidental overdose. >> this is crazy. not a single solitary one of these people has to die. >> we are used to think of it starting here, looking like this but something happened in this country. and now, increasingly, it starts here, in your own home. >> as we speak, someone is dying, right now. >> and over the next hour, three people will die u. >> went to sleep and he had no idea this was gonna be his last night on earth. >> from misusing perfectly legal prescription drugs. taking a deadly dose. >> pointen center, this is debra. >> i'm a little concern had that may have taken something that wasn't go

i'm a subspecialist saying this,

internists, there is a tremendous amount you can do for your patients before you need to call in subspecialists, or send your patients out and parcel their care out to other physicians. and that helps you to build trust, and that makes it a bit easier on the patients. they only have to come to one place, see one doctor. but when the needs arise to get them elsewhere, initially, it is handled the same way. a phone call is made from my nurse, my social worker, my medical assistant to the patient, to the site where they may have an appointment. gary feinberg: quite often i will see a patient that's been referred to me by another doctor. i'll have a pulmonologist-- a lung doctor-- who will send me a patient who has asthma, and the pulmonologist wants me to assess whether or not the sinuses are causing the asthma problem. and after assessing the patient, getting the radiological studies, and determining that there's sinus disease, then i call the pulmonologist, and i call him on the phone or i call her on the phone and say we have this problem. the patient's going to need surgery... the patient will

it trains more than 40% of general pediatricians and 43% of pediatric subspecialists. sequestration, automatic cuts, would take $21 million from this program, forcing the reduction of residency slots, training of doctors at children's hospitals across the country. we want to have these quality doctors that are able to make sure they can care for our children. i want to go back to something that representative maloney raised, and that's the w.i.c. program, women, infants and children and immunizations. experts agree we must combat our deficits by bringing down the total cost of health care. that's true. the sequestration could result in just the opposite. the sequestration cuts to programs such as the -- what can he call the food stamp program, the -- what we call the food stamp program, the snap program, or the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children, and the 13 immunization programs that will have their funding cut, if we're to reduce our national health care he expenditures, we have to make sure -- health care expundtures, we have to make sure