Posted on 10/01/2007 4:37:46 AM PDT by NewMediaJournal
According to the AMA, in many communities around the United States, there is a physician shortage, which presents a serious health care problem. For a host of reasons, more than twenty million people are affected by the inability to access quality medical services. While the premise of a popular television show, “Northern Exposure,” alluded to this very predicament some time ago, most viewers were likelier caught up in the relationships between the quirky inhabitants of Cicely, Alaska instead of pondering the very real implications for those without access to a qualified doctor.
Similar to the circumstances in which the main character, Dr. Joel Fleischman, upon graduating from Columbia University medical school (which he attended on a scholarship from the state of Alaska), finds himself assigned to be the General Practitioner of a tiny Alaskan town in order to pay for his education, “medical schools have adopted a selective medical school admission policy to enhance a primary care choice in underserved communities.” The reality, though, is that while some students eventually practice in underserved communities, others do not.
Limited access to medical care is not always because doctors are unavailable. When ill, people who live in urban areas are sometimes unable to travel on a crowded bus or take other forms of mass transit in order to receive medical care.
(Excerpt) Read more at newmediajournal.us ...
Everybody just calm down.
You are all being fooled by this hysetical nonsense.
There are plenty of lawyers left over to take care of you.
HillaryCare will fix this, no doubt.
Wait until socialized medicine (heaven forbid) - then you’ll really see a shortage.
Between insurance company and government paperwork and government underfunding and insurance company payment delays more and more doctors are wondering why they went to medical school.
They’ll need to lower the educational requirements in order to get more doctors and nurses. You’ll be better off getting medical advice from the local tattoo artist.
Medicine should be the most local of all services. Communities and neighborhoods should look after themselves.
Children should be encouraged to study medicine. Local groups should set up scholarships tied to a service contract.
It is stupid and dangerous to allow remote governments to decide who gets health care.
BINGO!!! The reason this article was written...
ping
“HillaryCare will fix this, no doubt.”
And when that nightmare arrives and thousands of doctors retire as a result, there will be plenty of foreign Muslim doctors ready to take over your health care, as they have done in Britain.
This reminds me of the story used as the definition of chutzpah: a man murders both his parents then pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.
The AMA, through the medical schools has been constricting the supply of physicians for decades. Only students with A’s in Calc I, Calc II, and Organic Chemistry, and GPA’s of 3.9 or higher even get looked at by most med schools. Then there is the hazing ritual of 36 hour shifts without sleep on interships—a useless ‘training’ excercise except for specialties in which one is on-call for long stretches and has to perform under such adverse circumstances.
The problem, along with one aspect of health care costs, can be easily fixed: the medical profession has to stop constricting access to medical education, and fighting off possible competition (by, for instance opposing prescription priviledges for psychologists who take extra courses in psychopharmcology, and lobbying to drive nurse-midwives out of business) in order to keep their wage rates artificially high.
Best kept secret by the DBM... and wait till Hillary starts telling them what and where they must practice.
The doctor-guilds cap admissions at the schools. Many qualified students are shunted to PA or NP school. And believe me, PAs and NPs as talented as they are ... are not physicians.
If this country doesn’t get rid of the lawyers, via tort reform, the medical field and the associated quality of care currently available in America will be a thing of the past.
(see my tag line...)
same BS fourty years ago
>>Best kept secret by the DBM... and wait till Hillary starts telling them what and where they must practice.<<
Medical school is one of the most grueling ordeals that anyone can be put through - to say nothing of the awesome expense. How many people will do it for the privilege of being a government employee at the beck and call of Hillaryite bureaucrats? Also, once costs start to escalate, look for the government to cap doctors’ salaries. In the USSR, being a doctor was regarded as a low-status occupation.
Atlas will shrug.
If even the AMA admits there is a shortage, it must be really bad. But cheer up... Once Hillary resumes relations with Cuba, we’ll be able to get healthcare in Havana.
This is just another govt regulated monopoly (state boards) that allow the AMA members to skim the cream.
Either stop the govt monopoly, or stop the AMA members from skimming the cream.
Stopping the monopoly is preferable. Socialists would prefer the latter solution but it is unworkable due to human nature.
BUMP
Medical school Residency is one of the most grueling ordeals that anyone can be put through
Oh, no! We’re all gonna die!
What is really troubling is that the many of these doctors diagnose the problem—inadequate reimbursement—but then see the remedy as more government.
Incidentally, if you are a Medicare recipient, you soon find that it is hard to find a physician let alone see him. Usually, most of the 1:1 contact is done by physician’s assistants, registered nurses and so forth. This is a big change although, I must say, I would rather see a contactful and pleasant nurse or a physician’s assistant than an impatient doctor “on the meter.”
I’ve often noted that when the government grants a monopoly to a corporation (as when utilities require state-granted right-of-ways to function) that it regulates fees, while when it grants a monopoly to a guild (physicians, lawyers, psychologists, actuaries, CPA’s. . .) it doesn’t.
Unregulated (as regards to fees) monopoly guilds, most notably the lawyers and physicians, are a blight on our free-market system, and should be obnoxious to both right and left alike (albeit for very different reasons). Probably because most politicians are lawyers, and thus beneficiaries of the system, though, no one wants to actually address the issue.
We can always import doc’s from the ME and Pakistan. Just like Britain does.
???
Ooops... I missed the ellipsis in my first, second, and third reading. Sorry!
Finally, someone who understands. The AMA union should, indeed, have expertise in the doctor shortage: its union bosses are largely responsible for creating and sustaining it.
Most of the complaints I here from residents is that they could be out making money. They forget they are still students. The schedules are stupid. The “I did 60 hours so they can too” is stupid and should/is being changed.
The “ordeal” is not so bad for many, depends on the specialty.
I say open the schools up and let students compete. We can easily sort them out in the first two years. I don’t believe in artificial barriers such a fixed number in a program. Admission should be limited by interest from students not artificial barriers created by professional groups. The only obligation a school has is to produce a qualified individual not to limit someone’s choice or provide a job. If we produce too many then applications will drop. We need people that are interested in medicine and people not just big bucks. We have too many of the later and not enough of the former, and people wonder about malpractice. If your good and like your patients, not just their money, the money will roll in.
I can think of at least one MD who will seriously consider leaving Medicine with the advent of HillaryCare, and I would not blame anyone for not entereing Medicine now, under current conditions, much less Socialized Medicine.
TennCare and Medicare has been bad enough...
We already do to the tune of about 25% of all of our doctors. Most big city hospitals couldn't operate without foreign born/trained doctors.
BUMP!
60 hours? 80 is the Legal limit now, but 90 - 100 is still the norm at least in the surgical residencies.
. We can easily sort them out in the first two years.
Maybe, but the bottleneck isn't medical school, but matching for residency. Unless all of the pathway is enlarged there will still be the same limitations on numbers.
Are you brain-damaged? Were you dropped at birth? You may be entitled to a large cash award. For more info, Please call:
1-800-SHYSTER.
But...if we get socialized medicine (Hillary care)who are the lawyers going to sue? The doctors will be salaried...no BIG bucks, and the rest is government controlled.
I surprised the lawyers don’t see this coming. One of their most lucrative sources will be wiped out. The goose with the golden eggs will be dead.
Doubling money spent will result in but a few percentage points. Meanwhile and unconnected will be workplace deaths of productive people who have to work harder, longer, at sea, on roofs, digging, mining, driving at night in the rain to pay the additional taxes. We will kill (I say murder) more than we sort of save, in that we are just prolonging.
The rest is a distribution problem that is unsolvable. If you live in a urban/rural area and can not get to care, you must be one antisocial prick if the people that know you won’t drive you, or, you have been so self centered you know no one. Why this is a greater society problem I don’t know. But then I don’t know why we spend billions on well educated, upper income, no family gays that like group sodomy.
What is with the (E tm) sign with apostrophes? I'm using IE with XP? WTHeck?
You are proposing a definite reduction in the quality of health care. It is like the difference between having a CPA doing your taxes or a bookkeeper.
No thanks. I want the requirements kept high to ensure I don’t have the student who spent 4 years at the frat house carousing instead of learning his calculus and chemistry.
Buried in the bowels of Hillary Care 1, was a provision that would have forced medical students into certain medical specialties by imposing national caps on specialty training. Want to be a surgeon or a cardiologist ...too bad ...the government says we need more dermatologists. If that kind of medical micromanagement appears in Hillary Care 2, then we could expect a lot fewer of our best and brightest students would choose to go into medicine.
This young man might be an excellent new American doctor but for impediments to his practicing here.
I do not know why such a person could not be tested by exam and observation and allowed to practice. He is an OB-GYN, a specialty in short supply.
At the same social occasion during which I met the MD from Brazil, I met a woman who is an MD from Barcelona, Spain, and she echoed the same comments. These two doctors will return to their native countries having studied here but who cannot practice here without jumping through major hoops.
I am given to understand human bodies found in Brazil and Spain are quite similar to those encountered in the U.S.
Can’t happen. We’re all gonna be dead of bird flu first.
My point is that the insurance and legal professions have piled on to the system, milking it for every penny.
My father forecast this in 1964, when the government radically changed the health care sector and divorced it from free market principles.
"they have just handed the keys to the national Treasury to the doctors, lawyers, and insurance agents."
I thought that he was nuts... sigh.
If you think that physicians are unregulated in regards to fees, you are completely uneducated on the subject.
The blight on free market competition started when people stopped paying their own medical bills.
Actually, an A in Calculus (esp. Calc II, since differential calculus might be seen as relevant to drug-clearance rates) is irrelevant to the practice of medicine. Getting through med school without flunking out is a sufficient guarantee of quality medical care unless the med school curiculum and grading standards are watered down.
Whether one was a throat or a slacker as an undergrad is not really a relevant matter. All of the ‘gateway’ courses are typically taken as a freshman or sophomore. A lot of folks manage to grow up during college, esp. if they take a junior year abroad. Limiting med school admission to the ones who were either actually mature or just good little boys and girls who worried about their grades the first two years of college is an artificial constriction of supply that doesn’t really improve the quality of medical care.
The ‘ensuring quality’ argument has been used as a justification for monopoly guilds since the days of the Hanseatic League, when flax weavers had a monopoly guild. It still doesn’t provide a basis for creating a state-granted monopoly without regulating its fees. “Whatever the market will bear,” is a perfectly fine pricing scheme when either actual or potential competition exists. Unfortunately, the state grants a monopoly to an artificially constricted supply of physicians then allows whatever the market will bear pricing.
Of course you know why such a person can’t be tested by exam and observation and allowed to practice: monopoly guilds artifically constrict supply of persons allowed to engage in the monopoly activity to keep their wage rates artifically high.
We also know why monopoly guilds are allowed to exist, with a few lone voices like The_Reader_David here on FR raising the issue at all: most politicians are lawyers, and lawyers have a monopoly guild that they want to preserve.
The state doesn’t regulate them, and the boards of the Blues that define ‘usual and customary fees’ are full of physicians. The price of linen was regulated by the flax weaver’s guild back in the days of the Hanseatic League.
Self-regulation of a monopoly guild isn’t really regulation, not in the sense that utility monopolies are regulated to ensure that consumers are not price-gouged by the monopolists: it’s part of the monopoly enforcing its own interests.
Well, my one son is an MD and he not only took the pre med courses but his degree was in History while graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He also joined a fraternity. My other son started in pre med but wound up majoring in Fraternity parties. The frat boy son could have made a conscientious MD but blew off trying for med school as no med school would have looked at the grades he made.
I think the study habits which achieve grades reasonably guarantee a kid who is going to pay attention to the med schl studies. It is reasonable to prefer the consistent scholar in my medical care should I need it.
Both sons are terrific human beings!
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