Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Good News: A Surge in New U.S. Medical Schools

"Nearly two dozen medical schools have recently opened or might open across the country, the most at any time since the 1960s and ’70s.  During the 1980s and ’90s only one new medical school was established.  These new schools are seeking to address an imbalance in American medicine that has been growing for a quarter century. 

The proliferation of new schools is also a market response to a rare convergence of forces: a growing population; the aging of the health-conscious baby-boom generation; the impending retirement of, by some counts, as many as a third of current doctors; and the expectation that, the present political climate notwithstanding, changes in health care policy will eventually bring a tide of newly insured patients into the American health care system. 

If all the schools being proposed actually opened, they would amount to an 18 percent increase in the 131 medical schools across the country. ( By comparison, there are 200 law schools approved by the American Bar Association.)  And beyond the new schools, many existing schools are expanding enrollment, sometimes through branch campuses." 

MP: Maybe we'll know we've got enough physicians when we see a proliferation of ads for doctors making house calls? 

I'll believe this when the AMA actually accredits them.  AMA doesn't certify all comers in order to limit the supply of doctors, that's why nobody bothers to start new medical schools.  Even if they do get certified, the AMA always imposes strict enrollment limits as a condition, putatively to improve quality, but in reality to create scarcity and raise doctor's wages. 

The issue about IMGs is that some are americans who can not currently get into us med schools.  Explaining the med schools in places like Grenada.  As noted we need to finish moving to a model where outpatient primary care physicians don't do hospital treatment, but it is done by hospitalists.  Then the training can more nearly fit what the role will be, a primary care physician will then be trained to recognize when a hospitalization is needed, and forward the records and the patient to the hospitalist for treatment, the reverse will happen after discharge.