NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – A statewide doctor shortage is increasing wait times for New Mexico patients. This year, dermatology wait times reached record highs, and medical groups warn delays will continue to grow without legislative action.
“Many of the doctors who are here are tired; they’re overworked. They need some help. We need to recruit more doctors into this state, and if we don’t take action right now, I think you know it’s not too outlandish to think about it: a collapse of the medical system.”
That’s according to retina surgeon Dr. Nathaniel Roybal, who spends his spare time as a physician advocate, working with communities and lawmakers to find ways to incentivize doctors to stay in — and come to — New Mexico. He said doctors around the state believe it is risky to practice here because it is easy to be sued for medical malpractice, which he calls the major driver behind the doctor shortage.
Roybal is a former president of the Greater Albuquerque Medical Association and a councilor for the New Mexico Medical Society. He warned that the state’s health care system is at a crisis point — and that New Mexican patients and their loved ones are the ones who suffer most. “In this state, in this healthcare system, the most vulnerable are always the poor. Always the sick. It just is,” said Roybal. “And if you can’t take care of 100% of New Mexicans, I worry that the ones that will be taken care of are the ones that have insurance that can afford to be taken care of.”
Advertisement
A prime example of the shortage is the dermatology department at UNM Hospital, which sent a memo to providers about six months ago.
The memo reads, “due to a critical shortage of dermatologists at UNMH,” wait lists for new patient appointments have reached an unprecedented one to one-and-a-half years. The UNM dermatology department said it is still only accepting referrals for urgent cases. “Obviously, that’s concerning if you are the New Mexican who has a dermatologic problem and needs to see a physician,” Roybal said.
In a statement to KRQE News 13, UNMH said that since the memo was sent, additional doctors have been hired, with two more expected to join next year. The hospital said it has expanded e-consults, is holding free walk-in skin cancer screenings in rural areas, and has reduced the number of patients waiting for an appointment by nearly 50%.
UNMH is not the only health care group working to close the gap. Dr. Denise A. Gonzales, medical director for Presbyterian Medical Group, said Presbyterian Hospital has some promising developments planned for the new year. She said the shortage of dermatologic care providers has been an issue for a long time, particularly in New Mexico, where UV exposure risk is high.
Presbyterian has never had a full-scale dermatology department like UNM’s and has often referred patients to UNM and community dermatologists for Mohs surgeries. Gonzales said that over the past few years, Presbyterian has brought teledermatology to Plains Regional Medical Center in Clovis, New Mexico.
Advertisement
She said thanks to that program, dermatologists can evaluate Albuquerque patients while they are home, and if a biopsy is needed, they can have it done in Presbyterian facilities. “That’s just a very small amount of increase in services that we’ve been able to do in the last two years, recognizing that there is a shortage of dermatology services throughout the state.”
The Presbyterian Healthcare Foundation recently announced it is launching its first full-service dermatology clinic, funded by a $2.5 million gift from Ellen and Jim King to the newly formed “King Fund for Dermatology.”
“In the fall of 2026 is when we expect to have our clinic fully open and staffed with physicians and PA’s who can do the full breadth of treatments and diagnoses so they can treat things like acne and skin cancers, they can treat it with light therapy and lasers, and can cut things out if they need to be cut out,” Gonzales said.
She said the long-term goal is to expand those services across Presbyterian’s regional centers by connecting patients to experts in Albuquerque through telemedicine. “So, it’s as easy as putting a camera on it and talking to that expert in Albuquerque to then decide on what the next steps should be,” Gonzales said.
Still, medical professionals said meaningful change must happen at the legislative level. Many welcomed Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s decision to include medical malpractice reform in the call for the upcoming 30-day legislative session.
Advertisement
UNM’s statement and Dr. Roybal said the issue extends far beyond dermatology. “That’s the problem, not just playing out in dermatology, it’s playing out in ophthalmology and internal medicine, and family practice, and you name it,” Roybal said.
UNMH said it could not provide a current estimate for new patient wait times, citing the difficulty of projecting timelines while working through existing patient lists.
While the New Mexico Medical Society and the Greater Albuquerque Medical Association said medical malpractice reform should be the top priority, some lawmakers are pushing to broaden the discussion. Proposals include increasing residency slots and changing the gross receipts tax rule that requires physicians to pay taxes on payments received for medical services.
There is also disagreement over data. Think New Mexico, a local think tank, reports that New Mexico has one of the nation’s highest rates of medical malpractice lawsuits. And that the state lost more physicians between 2019-2024 than any other state in the country. However, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joseph Cervantes (D-Las Cruces) said during a recent radio interview that the data is false.
Dr. Roybal, however, stands by Think New Mexico’s data and adding he’s always willing to take anyone to the CMS.gov website (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) to walk people through it. He also suggested lawmakers who are also trial lawyers, such as Sen. Cervantes, should recuse themselves from both the discussion and votes on the issue due to a conflict of interest.
Advertisement
Roybal said he is confident New Mexico communities will unite to make their voices heard, calling the issue a generational fight that will shape the state’s future. He believes a balance can be found that protects patients while incentivizing doctors. “Doctors want their patients to be whole. We don’t want it to be impossible to ever sue, or if there was somebody who did something nefarious that was just terrible and hurt somebody, we want that person to be taken care of, their future medical to be covered, we want them to make sure they’re compensated for something that happened that was terrible,” Roybal said. “We also have to recognize, on the other hand, the number of people that happens to is between .1 and .01 percent of the population. And so when you have a law that’s overly protective in that situation and really stretches it allows for hundreds of millions of lawsuits in a single suit, it no longer serves the greater good.”
Dr. Gonzales said addressing the shortage will require multiple solutions. “Things like tort reform are important and the cost of medical malpractice, but it’s also important to make sure that Medicare and Medicaid have appropriate funding levels that we make it easy for people to obtain licenses in this state,” Gonzales said.
She added that New Mexico does not participate in the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact. “That’s a very difficult nut to crack, because it’s not as simple as just join the compact. There are downsides and risks to that as well,” she said.
Gonzales closed with a personal note, saying she wants better access to care for her mother in rural New Mexico. She emphasized the need for sustained effort beyond legislative sessions. “It has to be continuous. It has to be multifaceted, and it’s got to be something where we’re moving the ball along all the time. And we can’t give up on it, because it impacts so many things about New Mexico,” Gonzales said.
VALENCIA COUNTY, N.M. – Valencia County Fire Department responded to a serious UTV crash after two people suffered major injuries in the Rio Puerco area.
The Valencia County Fire Department one patient was flown to the hospital with critical injuries. A second patient went by ambulance with serious injuries.
The fire department said this was the second serious ATV or UTV crash its crews handled that day.
Earlier in the day, units responded to an ATV crash that sent two children to the hospital with multiple traumatic injuries.
Advertisement
The fire department urged riders to wear helmets, stay off roadways and make sure children do not operate ATV or UTV vehicles without supervision.
Descending the sloping grasslands toward his livestock, Ronald Mascareñas reflected on the bygone days when nearly all the pastures in this lush community were thronged with cattle or sheep and neighbors banded together for a yearly ditch cleaning.
But as the cost of land in these villages in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rises and more transplants move in — and a younger generation of locals moves out — he sees fewer people practicing a hard-toiling, rural lifestyle along the High Road to Taos.
“Now, there’s only a handful of us with cattle,” said Mascareñas, a Taos County commissioner who lives in Llano, a small community near Peñasco, as he walked the property that has been in his family for generations. “Like I said, things have changed.”
Advertisement
The mountain village of Truchas is one Northern New Mexico community concerned about gentrification and the ongoing housing trends pricing locals out.
Nathan Burton/The New Mexican
Advertisement
Concerns about gentrification in Northern New Mexico are hardly new, but some longtime residents say they feel particularly priced out these days. On the other hand, the real estate market is good for landowners who wish to sell in a region that has long struggled with high rates of unemployment, poverty and population loss.
Real estate signs can be spotted in three prominent communities perched along the scenic N.M. 76, a popular route to Taos for sightseers but a familiar route home for locals. Chimayó, Truchas and Peñasco have seen modest, two-bedroom homes sell for around $400,000 and luxury properties sell for over $1 million.
Up here, land is regularly listed at $20,000 to $30,000 an acre — a sharp rise from previous decades, before locals became “land rich, money poor,” as Mascareñas put it, noting property he purchased at $3,000 an acre in the mid-1990s would likely be priced around $30,000 an acre or more today.
Some longtime residents say prices like this, bringing newcomers with bigger pocketbooks, continue to change the feel of these distinctive villages, long synonymous with big heaps of firewood, hard labor, adobe churches, art studios at high elevations and free-flowing acequias.
Advertisement
“I’m concerned,” Mascareñas said. “My parents were concerned for us, and our generation did halfway decent. We were able to make a living. But it’s the next generation, our grandkids: Unless we are able to give them property to start something up, they’re probably not going to be able to stay in the area.”
The New Mexican
Renting is seldom an option in rural Northern New Mexico.
Residents in Rio Arriba and Taos counties overwhelmingly own their homes, with just 22.2% of Rio Arriba County residents renting and 20.1% of Taos County residents renting, according to a 2023 study from the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority.
Advertisement
The study found about 25% of Santa Fe County residents are renters.
‘Affordability for people’
This month, the most expensive house on the market in Peñasco — about 50 miles northeast of Santa Fe on N.M. 75, just south of the highway’s intersection with N.M. 76 — is listed at $3.5 million, according to the website Realtor.com, a digital real estate marketplace that aggregates listings. That property is an outlier in the community, home to some 500 souls not far from the stunning Jicarita and Trampas peaks.
Still, a modest, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home on 1.97 acres, built in 1998, is listed at $339,000 and a four-bedroom house on 0.46 acres is listed at $480,000.
That compares with an average home price in Santa Fe of $625,000 in the first quarter of 2026, according to data from the Santa Fe Association of Realtors. And statewide, the New Mexico Association of Realtors recently reported, the average home was priced at $350,000 in April.
Advertisement
Mascareñas said a majority of the people who are able to buy properties in isolated villages like Peñasco are coming from out of state, paying prices many locals could not conceive of affording. Traditionally, land in these communities — many of which were founded as Spanish land grants — is passed down through generations of families, but some heirs may elect to sell if they are unable to keep it or uninterested in moving back.
Not everyone agrees the current market is pricing locals out.
David Cordova
Advertisement
Courtesy of Sotheby’s International Realty
David Cordova, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s International Realty who has deep family ties to Truchas and was born and raised in Northern New Mexico, said rural communities remain much cheaper than places like Santa Fe and Taos. He noted “there’s a lot of affordable properties out there.”
Citing data collected by the Santa Fe Association of Realtors, Cordova said 12 properties have been listed and closed in Truchas in roughly the last five years ranging from $200,000 up to $673,000.
“I still think there’s an affordability for people,” Cordova said. “I’m all about having our families being able to live there, and you can routinely find properties between $200,000 and $300,000 and $400,000.”
Advertisement
He added, “I think people find themselves deeply rooted in coming back and feeling the soil, feeling the air and having a property in Northern New Mexico. Sales have been really good. The High Road to Taos is where it’s just absolutely stunning, you know.”
‘Hard to maintain’
The old Chimayó post office along N.M. 76 is now about half an acre of concrete wiped clean of any structure; its status as the community’s post office ended in a 2023 Valentine’s Day inferno.
The property has a blue Sotheby’s International Realty sign out front, and an online listing shows it is up for sale for $200,000.
Advertisement
A sign from luxury real estate broker Sotheby’s advertises a home for sale in the village of Truchas on Thursday.
Nathan Burton/The New Mexican
Advertisement
Pat Oviedo-Trujillo, 76, a lifelong resident of Chimayó who can trace her family roots back 12 generations in this region, likened the trends of rising prices in the local real estate market to the plight of characters in the 1974 novel The Milagro Beanfield War.
The Northern New Mexico classic, written by the late Taos County resident John Nichols, is about Hispanic farmers fighting the prospect of cultural and lifestyle loss against the backdrop of a water rights dispute.
“When John Nichols wrote that book, he was very prophetic, because that’s exactly what’s happening right now in these little towns,” Oviedo-Trujillo said.
“I’ll die here,” she said. “But all of a sudden, my property taxes have gone through the roof, and it’s hard to maintain even what you have.”
The five homes listed for sale last week on Realtor.com in the Chimayó area were priced at $1.1 million, $639,000, $439,000, $350,000 and, certainly the most affordable, $60,000.
Advertisement
A housing market analysis from Zillow, a prominent online real estate marketplace, shows a substantial increase in home values in Chimayó since 2018, with values rising from an average of about $222,000 in 2018 to about $335,000 now. Home values in an area generally correspond to home prices.
A 2015 Santa Fe County plan for Chimayó addresses how the residential makeup of the village — known for being home to one of the largest Catholic pilgrimage sites in North America, El Santuario de Chimayó, but also for a decadeslong struggle with addiction — has changed in recent decades, becoming more of a Santa Fe bedroom community.
Until the mid-1900s, land development patterns were largely small, clustered residential settlements on hills above the acequias to preserve large areas of “contiguous irrigated farmland on the gentle slopes and valley floor,” the county plan says.
“As the economy changed and the community became less dependent on farming to support their families,” the plan continues, “land development patterns evolved to accommodate scattered individual home-sites on parcels spread out across the valley.”
‘Way over market’
Advertisement
The only three homes listed for sale in Truchas last week on Realtor.com were priced at $800,000, $1.2 million and $599,000. A bare 1-acre lot in the scenic mountain village is listed at $39,500; 10-acre lots are listed at $339,000 and $225,000.
Truchas is approached by way of winding mountain roads — an idyllic village unfurling near cliff edges about 10 miles from the valley that cradles Chimayó and much higher in altitude — about 8,000 feet in elevation.
Sahd’s hardware store owner and Peñasco fire chief Randy Sahd inside the family-owned and operated business on Thursday in Peñasco. “We’ve become a bedroom community for Los Alamos and Santa Fe,” Sahd said, remarking on the increasing cost of land and properties in the community.
Advertisement
Nathan Burton/The New Mexican
Dio Dominguez, an acequia mayordomo in Truchas, said he has seen properties, such as a 3-acre parcel with an old home on it, sell at prices that shock him. “They’re paying way, way over market, so it’s kind of messing everyone up,” Dominguez said, noting the tax burden this phenomenon can create is the hardest on locals.
These communities, particularly Truchas, have seen a migration of newcomers for some time.
Advertisement
“Not Another Taos — Yet,” read a 2002 headline in The New Mexican about Truchas and the influx of artists moving there as galleries opened along its main street.
“In a town legendary for its hostility toward outsiders, Truchas is a thriving little art town these days,” The New Mexican reported, underscoring changes in Truchas, which means trout in Spanish.
Randy Sahd, a lifelong resident of Peñasco, owns the local hardware store, where locals trickled in Thursday morning to banter a bit and decide which newspapers to purchase. He attributed the cost of land in this region to the “outside influence” and “people who have money” from out of state.
“Who in New Mexico has that kind of money?” said Sahd, the local volunteer fire chief, alluding to some high-priced local properties that have sold.
He suggested many people who own land in the area no longer live there.
Advertisement
The family-owned and operated Sahd’s hardware store in Peñasco has served the mountain village of roughly 500 for over 50 years.
Nathan Burton/The New Mexican
Advertisement
“Everybody up here has ancestral properties, and they live in Utah or Colorado, and they have no interest in keeping their property anymore,” Sahd said. “So, when somebody offers them $20,000 an acre that a couple of years ago was only $4,000 an acre …”
Such an offer can be hard to resist.
“We’ve gone from being a rural community to a bedroom community,” Sahd said.
Embracing outsiders?
Advertisement
These communities, apart from the current real estate situation, have struggled for some time with population loss, particularly as young people migrate to more urban areas. Poverty and limited professional opportunities help drive the outmigration.
Some homes in the villages sit vacant in various states of disuse.
Truchas, at least historically, had a reputation as a community suspicious of outsiders moving in as locals move out.
But Cordova pointed out the parades of hippies in rainbow buses who arrived in places like Dixon and Truchas in the 1960s and ’70s.
Advertisement
The mountain village of Truchas is one Northern New Mexico community concerned about gentrification and the ongoing housing trends pricing locals out.
Nathan Burton/The New Mexican
Advertisement
“People thought at the time, ‘Were they going to clash with the Hispanic culture that was there?’ ” Cordova said. “To be honest with you, a lot of friendships and bonds were made, and people are still there from back in the ’70s.”
He added, “A lot of us here are people who embrace people coming from the outside. We’ve embraced the people who are working at Los Alamos National Labs. We’ve embraced the fact that many of us work our tractors and we work our livestock — and it’s a community that knows how to work hard and appreciates anybody that works hard.”
Can’t keep kids local
Still, life in these communities — with scarce jobs and rising home prices — is increasingly unattainable for young locals, and traditions are disappearing.
“We’re having a hard time keeping our kids local,” Mascareñas said. “If they leave to go get educated, they come back and it’s challenging for them because they can’t afford to buy something.”
Advertisement
He added, “We’re trying to keep these traditions and cultures alive. But if you don’t have the people to do it, you can’t keep them alive, and if you start chopping away at the properties” — subdividing for family members — “they get smaller and smaller. You can’t have cattle, you can’t have horses.”
This week, Mascareñas said the community of Llano no longer has an annual acequia cleaning because there were not enough participants.
Now, the spring cleaning is individualized, and parcientes are responsible for cleaning their own sections of ditch.
“That’s how we’ve had to change, right?” he said. “We no longer gather for ditch cleanings. Everybody does their own property because we can’t gather the amount of people it takes to do it. I remember, as a kid, there used to be 60 to 80 of us cleaning, and I’m talking from my grandpa to my dad to me.”
Advertisement
Rancher and Taos County Commissioner Ronald Mascareñas returns home after feeding his cattle Thursday in Llano.
