One Doctor on the Doctor Shortage

From the comments here.

 There is a huge international pool of capable, English speaking, newly-minted foreign-trained medical school graduates every year. Many would be happy to immigrate, do their residency training and raise their families in the US. Many are leaving countries where the monies paid under US government healthcare price controls are a relative fortune. Some leave a country like Canada, because they want to escape a socialized system where private insurance is outlawed.

HHS has total federal agency discretion to control funding and expansion of physician residency training programs. They can quickly expand the nation’s physician pool.

Furthermore, the medical profession has dramatically extended the required post-graduate training years since I graduated from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1976. It unconscionably forces young women doctors to delay starting their families at child birth ages we recommend as optimal for our patients. . . or prevents these young women physicians from entering the medical field best suited to their talents because they don’t want to outsource raising their children.

As physicians, we have always known and discuss with each other that one of the primary reasons that training time was extended so dramatically was to delay young physician entry into the marketplace.

Dorothy Calabrese MD
Allergy & Immunology, San Clemente, CA

Often the blog comments are better than the post.