Posted on 07/29/2012 4:54:59 AM PDT by MrPiper
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — In the Inland Empire, an economically depressed region in Southern California, President Obama’s health care law is expected to extend insurance coverage to more than 300,000 people by 2014. But coverage will not necessarily translate into care: Local health experts doubt there will be enough doctors to meet the area’s needs. There are not enough now.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Like this recent EO:
WHITE HOUSE INITIATIVE ON EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS
More like a Work-fare program to fix that problem. Gee, I would feel a whole lot better getting medical care from someone making minimum wage!
That “likely” is a certitude. Doctors are already making plans to retire. Other doctors are exploring setting up practices offshore, as English doctors and the Canadian doctors have done when their countries converted medicine to a low paid trade. The doctor shortage in numbers is one thing. The dearth of smart dedicated people going to med school is another. Smart people will who would have gone into medicine will choose other areas. Medicine will no longer attract the people who are smart enough to be successful doctors. The shortage of brainpower will exceed the shortage in manpower.
What person in their right mind would spend 10 years of post grad study and tens of thousands of dollars for a profession where the gubermint tells you how, when and what??
So 2020 rolls around. You have a pain. You call down to your local doctor...Dr Twang, who has a visa and is from Hong Kong...but he’s too busy. So you call up the alternate guy on this side of town...Dr Woomba-Woomba, who has a visa and is from Nigeria. He would see you...but in four days. So you finally call that Dr Zhivago guy that you’ve heard about...who doesn’t have a visa but married some Honduran-turned-American gal, and he’s from Russia but only knows forty-four words in English. Dr Zhivago sees you and prescribes some great pain-killers, which you take in abundance....over several months.
One day, you finally wake up in Barstow, California but you don’t know where you are or how you got there. A local drifter tells you that you’ve been out in Barstow for a month...mostly doing pain-killers day by day, and you apparently married some Lebanese gal in Vegas while in this drug episode.
You go back home and wonder how 2700 pages of text created this mess. Then you wonder how this all started.
The medical schools themselves started this problem of not enough doctors. They restricted admission to only the very top students for yrs, making everyone else have to go outside the U.S. to go to school, or to seek another profession. I can remember this from back in the ‘70’s.
That’s the plan, man. With thousands of doctors planning to leave their practices, many of the elderly, who view Medicare-paid doctor visits as their only source of attention and entertainment, will not be able to find a doctor. They will die of boredom, thus taking the strain of those final expensive months of life off ObamaCare.
North Carolina's own probe discovered 54 courses within the Department of African and Afro-American Studies that showed little to no evidence of teaching students, and dozens of independent study classes without academic rigor. Most of the students in the classes were athletes, including some classes with only football or basketball players.
Here:
http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/07/north_carolinas_under-the-rada.html#incart_river_default
We are already being turned away from some doctors, as we are Medicare/Tricare Life (retired Military over 65), and we are down to seeing the PCP's PA instead of the doctor, yet they charge the same rates.
And before some one gripes about it, Medicare is a TAX we were forced to pre pay, and now make monthly premiums on. And 20 years of sub par pay and long deployments in the Navy earned the second one. And both are RATIONED HEALTH CARE.
Unlike congress and the prez and vp we do not have platinum healthcare for life along with platinum retirement.
My foot doc is black, retired Navy, and great care is given his patients.
Off shore is getting to be the only safe haven for EVERY business these days.
Not to worry, government will fix this mess created by eviiiil free business entrepreneurs./s
....and missing a kidney.
Recently went to one of my Dr.s.
Blood test, urine test. Consultation.
His bill to Medicare, $92.
Medicare paid him $19.
How many Medicare patients can he treat and stay in business?
As I have previously posted, my grand nephew, age 23, whom I consider to be extremely smart, somehow saw this coming and he decided to not do what his grandmother (my sister) wanted him to do: become a medical doctor. Instead, he went into engineering and is now working on his Phd in materials engineering, all expenses paid by this major university. That's how highly they think of him.
Lesson: Other very smart people are doing the same thing, dropping plans to be MDs because they don't want to work for the government.
“The medical schools themselves started this problem of not enough doctors. They restricted admission to only the very top students for yrs, making everyone else have to go outside the U.S. to go to school, or to seek another profession.”
There are a lot of docs out there already who I wouldn’t send patients to. If you lower admission standards it will only get worse. That’s not to say that everyone who gets in now is ‘the best’, and that outstanding people aren’t passed over, but you have to set the bar somewhere - especially when dealing with the lives of patients.
“His bill to Medicare, $92.
Medicare paid him $19.
How many Medicare patients can he treat and stay in business?”
This is a huge problem, that is only getting worse. In the meantime, the number of ‘administrators’ in hospital and government who draw big salaries from their ‘health care’ jobs is increasing, and malpractice insurance fees are not going down.
“There are a lot of docs out there already who I wouldn’t send patients to.”
And that’s with the admission restrictions.
My point is that the medical schools take no responsibility for their part in the Dr shortage. Many yrs ago, the schools felt like they were graduationg too many MD’s, causing a glut which was cutting into the $$ that Dr’s could make. So they made it really difficult to qualify for med school. That made students go to inferior med schools outside the country, or made kids not want to pursue the field at all.
Precisely
Mrs. Evad worked as a billing clerk for a group of doctors. She says they have already cut the docs to the bone.
A lot of docs have cut out the medicare/medicade and gone to patient pays. Cuts all the red tape and they charge less and make more.
Smart youngster. Best to him.
Given that even with stringent admission standards you still have a a fair amount of people who either wash out, can't pass boards, or don't become very competent physicians, I don't think the solution is to make it easier. I have no problem with having more slots, but I would maintain or increase, not decrease the stringency. Having said that, I would put much more emphasis on standardized testing for admissions than I would on the undergraduate school one goes to or their overall GPA. The problem is that they've altered the MCAT so much that I'm not sure what it means anymore.
Finally, I would absolutely give zero consideration to the kinds of ‘extracurricular’ activities that medical school admissions committees have given credit to in the selection process. Playing first violin in the community orchestra, or winning a poetry competition has nothing to do with being a good doc, and is not predictive.
This 2011 London Express article goes on to say that there is a large problem in that many of these foreign medical staff are not able to communicate in good English.
Is this what we have to look forward to here with the increase in service demand, decrease in renumeration and increase in bureaucracy under 'Obamacare'?
Does the MCAT consist of mostly science and math questions?
You seem to be stuck on the quality of the Dr. While that’s important, it has nothing to do with my original comment and the subject of the thread, which is the shortage of Dr’s.
I don’t think accepting students who have a 3.4 average is really scraping the bottom of the barrel, especially if they score decently on exams.
“Does the MCAT consist of mostly science and math questions?”
Used to be physics, chemistry/biochemistry, biology, and miscellaneous calculations, but was revised to have a more subjective writing section. It’s been a long while, and I’m not sure exactly what the overall content is at this point.
There was a movement, academically initiated, to try to include more people with a background in the ‘humanities’ in medical school admissions classes. Taking sociology, or anthropology, etc. doesn’t mean that you are going to be compassionate, or that you are going to be able to connect with the families of those who are dying.
“Does the MCAT consist of mostly science and math questions?”
Used to be physics, chemistry/biochemistry, biology, and miscellaneous calculations, but was revised to have a more subjective writing section. It’s been a long while, and I’m not sure exactly what the overall content is at this point.
There was a movement, academically initiated, to try to include more people with a background in the ‘humanities’ in medical school admissions classes. Taking sociology, or anthropology, etc. doesn’t mean that you are going to be compassionate, or that you are going to be able to connect with the families of those who are dying.
ah, thank you! I figured as much. And I do agree w/you that a humanities background doesn’t necesarily mean you’ll be more compassionate. That’s a more personal thing and hard to determine on a test. My mother (now retired) was an RN. Some doctors and nurses had a great bedside manner and others were terrible, according to her. However, she did not run into too many of the “terrible” ones very often. Thank goodness.
I expect there will be travel restrictions coming, soon with a kenyan second term, later with Romney. Keeping even a little of the ACA will lead to making it illegal to leave the country for healthcare then to leave the country with any money then just to leave the country. A lot of us will probably be kicking ourselves in a couple of years asking ourselves why we didn’t get out when we still could, meaning late 2012.
“I don’t think accepting students who have a 3.4 average is really scraping the bottom of the barrel, especially if they score decently on exams.”
I don’t either, and in fact feel that because of grade inflation at the Ivy schools and a lot of other factors GPA just doesn’t get it. If a young person who has been through personal hell in their lives (family deaths, other tragedies, abuse,) and/or have had to work their way through their undergraduate years does relatively poorly in their first 1-2 undergraduate years, and then pull all A’s and blow away the MCAT, I would much more favor that person than someone with a family legacy at high profile school X who had everything paid for and spent summers in Europe, but who wound up with a higher GPA.
My point is that the medical schools are not turning out consistently good docs as it is, and if you try to turn these schools into factories you will pay the price.
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