What Am I Missing? by Pat Conrad MD

Immigration and travel bans are the big new items this week, and CNN has dutifully trotted out a physician-rehab specialist, Dr. Ford Vox. Far removed from the myth of physicians making hard choices, Dr. Vox continues in the simpering, self-interested vein of doctor-whiners who believe society should be skewed to their narrow professional desires. Vox tells us that the travel ban “is a blunt instrument that’s already wreaking havoc and the impact is already being disproportionately felt in American health care.”

So Vox is a doc that wants to preach politics and is merely a partisan writing a political op-ed masquerading as a health info piece. Believe me, I can do the same, but that is not our purpose here. What really caught my interest is the stated reason as to WHY we need so many foreign doctors here.

“Our training hospitals posted job listings for 27,860 new medical graduates last year alone, but American medical schools only put out 18,668 graduates.”

With the aging of the Boomers predicted for decades now, why is there still a relative shortage of graduates?

“Even with our current influx of international physicians as well as steadily growing domestic medical school spots, the Association of American Medical Colleges estimates that we’ll be short by up to 94,700 doctors by 2025.”

Again, why the shortage? I get why someone from a country where AK-47’s are more common than toilet paper would find this a relatively attractive setting. And if you make the equivalent of $20 a day in the Peoples’ Republic of OhShitistan, then a hospital administrator ripping you off at $80 K a year still seems like a windfall.

Why haven’t U.S. medical schools ramped up to meet the increasing demand? They all blame the lack of government funding, but can that really be the answer, given the rise of tuitions and truckloads of private grants and Big Pharma cash dumped into the teaching institutions? Haven’t more and more U.S. students been clamoring to become doctors?

And why- please forgive the obvious lack of tolerant inclusiveness and diversity celebration here – why aren’t more actual Americans beating down the doors and filling all of the medical school and residency slots ahead of the foreign applicants? Isn’t this a highly attractive field for bright, hard charging natives? What am I missing?