Opening a new medical college in the U.S. currently costs around $200 million and takes approximately 7 years, mainly due to a stringent government certification process. These barriers limit the establishment of new medical schools, contribute to physician shortages, and reduce opportunities for aspiring medical professionals.
Policy: Streamline the approval process and eliminate unnecessary regulatory barriers that make it difficult and expensive to establish new medical schools.
This will increase the number of trained physicians, enhance competition, and improve access to medical education.
Make America Great Again by tripling Med Student Seats. . The proposal is to remove government obstacles and stumbling blocks to training new physicians. This would solve the pressures to bring on single payer, of blocking repeal of the ACA, of expanding the Federal involvement, of lack of diversity among health providers. If health care became the goal instead of health insurance, then efforts to divert more resources (dollars) into the bureaucracy, would be steered into tens of thousands of seats expansion. You have been Secretary for 2 months, and I know your 4 dozen agencies are begging for more budget money, and they expect you to beg Congress to expand and grow their agency. (Never mind, that these same managers, who want more, also designated a ¼th of their headquarters’ employees as ‘non-essential’ in the most recent government shutdown.)
The med school blockage began with the 1910 Flexner report which called for shutting down 2/3rds of Black medical schools, and ½ of the rest. The U.S. now has fewer medical schools than before World War One, while the U.S. population tripled. Compare the medical school shrinkage to growth in law schools’ numbers. Since the 1900 creation of the Association of American Law Schools, the number of U.S. law schools has increased six fold, plus graduation rates have increased by a 1/3rd, and dozens of part time and night law schools have become full time. The U.S. has more than 3 times the number of attorneys than physicians. The shortage of physicians, U.S. and world wide, is widely publicized, but with no effort to expand seats. A ¼th of U.S. physicians are trained overseas, and ½ of those come from India and Pakistan, a brain drain leaving foreign patients in dire straits. But, by using a combination of existing hospitals for seats, and video education, and a few billion, immediate openings are possible this year. Annually, the MCAT gives double (50,000) the tests as openings (22,000), after the students take micro, chemistry, and anatomy. All could attend medical school, if there were seats. At $100 thousand a year per seat, the U.S. could add a thousand seats for $100 million, instead of hiring 98 new Judges as requested by OMHA for the 2019 budget. The U.S. could add 20 thousand seats for every $2 billion a year.
Nobody is lobbying for more medical school seats. But anything else – more tax credits, health insurance plans, regulations, subsidies – won’t solve the shortage. Call or write if you want to know more. Regards,