Where Have All The Doctors Gone?

by Juliet Lapidos - April 28th, 2009 - Slate

Obama-administration officials have reportedly become alarmed by doctor shortages, especially since millions of previously uninsured people would gain coverage—and therefore increase demand—if the president manages to pass national health care reform. To make up for the physician shortfall, which several studies suggest could reach 100,000 over the next 20 years, the Association of American Medical Colleges is recommending a 30 percent increase in med-school enrollment. Why don't we have enough doctors?

[snip]

In 1996, a committee of the Institute of Medicine warned that the United States had a surfeit of doctors caused by foreign-trained physicians coming here to work and recommended freezing med-school class sizes and limiting first-year residency positions. A year later, Slate ran an article on an alternative strategy for reducing the number of doctors approved by the federal Health Care Financing Administration. Under the Graduate Medical Education Demonstration Project, 41 teaching hospitals received $400 million in exchange for not training between 20 percent and 25 percent of the medical residents they would otherwise have trained over the next six years.

In other words the same arrogant sanctimonious self righteous government bureaucrats of the political left who spent $400 million to create the Doctor shortage are going to fix the shortage for the American taxpayer by telling us to shut up and let them plan the solution.

If you trust bureaucrats to run your health care, you deserve the inconvenience and misery you will get. Oh yeah. You also will deserve the higher death rate too. But let's be honest. When your kids sue we know they will not sue the bureaucrat. They will sue the doctor who did his best in spite of the shortage the bureaucrat caused! With the corruption of our court system, they will win. That is justice in America today.