Ridiculous Study of the Month
Building More Medical Schools Won’t Solve Patient Access Issues
Yup, that was the headline. It turns out that we needed the brilliant ivory tower professors to figure out that no medical student wants to choose a specialty where he or she gets paid the least and that you can add all the medical school slots you want but they won’t choose primary care. And we needed a study for this? Why didn’t they just read this blog? I’ve been saying this for 12 years on this site.
Yes, but 12 years ago we could still get orthopedists, ENTs and plastic surgeons to provide ER coverage at the hospitals where they made their big bucks. They are careful to avoid EMTALA penalties when they are on call–but more & more hospitals are finding that they simply can’t fill their on-call schedule because doctors are too busy with sports medicine, cosmetic procedures and infertility to risk their incomes and mess up their appointment schedules by helping out in a facility that serves–ewww!!–uninsured patients.
(…and the lawyers…don’t forget about the lawyers…)
Doug you must be joking – are you tenured? Are you peer-reviewed? Do academic journals publish your grant-funded work?
Since when does the Ivory Tower seriously consider those whose only claim to expertise is that they actually do the damn work?
Hey Pat…you don’t have to be tenured, published, or peer reviewed to recognize when something is dead. Primary care is dead…unless we doctors can resuscitate it. Resuscitation of primary care requires new life blood into the pipeline. That life blood is students… who actually want to be family doctors. I teach students regularly in my family practice office. They don’t want to be family doctors. Why? Because they cannot imagine paying off $300-$500,000 in student loans on the salary of a grunt Family Doctor. It does not take a Harvard educated , tenured , published, and peer reviewed economist to figure that one out. It’s just horse sense.
Couldn’t agree more