Their plan is a failed Economic Model

In attempting to criticise our model, Opps get off on the wrong foot by stating that the comparative advantage poorer countries enjoy results from 'the higher capacity (and therefore demand) for accessing medical services and everything else in rich countries.' This isn't the cause of the comparative trading advantage at all. Poorer countries have a comparative advantage because of lower local costs, as demonstrated above in the case of Kenya, where the cost of training a doctor was 1/6th of the cost of doing so in the UK. Of course remunerations are proportionately higher in richer countries, hence the conditions for the medical brain drain. Opps go on to say that increasing the cost of recruiting doctors from poorer countries won't decrease demand for foreign doctors because demand for health care is inelastic. But this is to confuse the healthcare provider's demand for capacity with the patient's demand for treatment. If a hospital or health service is faced with two similarly qualified candidates, but the decision to hire one would require them to reimburse the cost of their training, it's obvious this would weigh in favour of the locally trained physician and reduce the attractiveness of the foreign option. Again, we reiterate, this is an inviolable law of the market, and it's why our suggestion cannot fail but to reduce the brain drain. That medical problems are most severe in SubSaharan Africa; that the priorities of medical research are seriously out of step with the needs of poorer countries, all these ills of the status quo we accept. But since the Opposition endorses the status quo it merely does their case a disservice to continue to quote them. The same is true of all their arguments about the domestic consequences of the brain drain; lead times in training new staff; skewed priorities in research and development, all these failures are failures of the status quo which they endorse and we oppose. For this reason, all the energy their pour into describing the pernicious effects of the medical brain drain; its negative impact on wider economic development and so on, serve our cause and undermine theirs. Opps then repeat the claim that even if donor countries were reimbursed for training medical personnel, this money would not necessarily be invested in health care. Again we say, however, that this is a great advance on the status quo, where poorer countries lose both the investment and the medical personnel it helped to create. As they put it, training medical personnel cannot be done easily with money, but it cannot be done at all without it. They also reheat their argument that the problem with our plan is not that we are offering to reimburse donor countries for their training of doctors, but that we are not offering them enough. Our answer is the same. A. Some restitution is better than none, and B. Where the brain drain is greatest, the potential for gain is greatest also. A newly graduated doctor in in India earns a basic salary of $160 a month, no wonder India exports more doctors than any other nation, over 40,000 work in the US alone, while a full 10% of UK doctors were trained in Indian medical schools. [http://content.nejm.org/cgi/reprint/353/17/1810.pdf] In the first place our suggestion would greatly reduce this number as shown ad nauseam, in the second, what medical personnel were still able to find work abroad would not represent a pure loss to the Indian economy, as now. We are not attracted to the idea of seeking to put a figure on the wider economic impact of the emigration of medical personnel, for the simple reason that if the proposed reimbursement becomes so high as to be a de facto embargo, then we would simply be lapsing into the already rejected protectionist model by default. It is only by pitching the cost of importing foreign trained doctors at a figure that represents value to both parties in the exchange (and is an unequivocal improvement over the status quo in poorer nations) that we are able to sanction the active recruitment of doctors and nurses by richer countries from poorer ones. Again we would give the example of the Phillipinnes, where even an informal adoption of our economic model resulted in a massive 10% increase in total national income. 'Failed economic model' indeed.