Lack of Doctors May Worsen as Millions Join Medicaid Rolls

“Or they may pass a law that orders all doctors to take Medicare and Medicaid patients. The shortage of doctors will be made up by importing millions of doctors from the Third World.”

I don’t know why people keep thinking that this is a realistic possibility. It may be possible to make up the shortfall in primary care by importing doctors from overseas. After receiving resident alien status, they could take an accrediting examination allowing them to practice general medicine in most states. This would give these doctors a status somewhat above a nurse practitioner, but they could not perform any specialty services.

It really doesn’t matter even if state boards allowed a poorly trained doctor off the boat from Pakistan boat to do neurosurgery. The fact remains that no hospital would permit an unqualified physician to obtain speciality privileges. The public relations would be horrible, the hospital credentialing committee would reject the application, but the bottom line is that such a physician would be unable to get malpractice insurance.

All specialists must go through residency and pass an accredited exam in their specialty. Residencies take anywhere between 4-8 years after med school, depending on the specialty. Sure, a primary care doctor can take care of many people with many conditions. But, if you have cancer, heart disease, or need a new knee or hip, you have to see a board certified specialist if you want care in the US.

As conditions continue to deteriorate for specialty physicians, they will retire at rates that well exceed replacement rate. Import all the doctors you want, pass coercive laws, you won’t makeup the loss.

Where my free helfcare at?

I don’t know why people keep thinking that this is a realistic possibility. It may be possible to make up the shortfall in primary care by importing doctors from overseas. After receiving resident alien status, they could take an accrediting examination allowing them to practice general medicine in most states. This would give these doctors a status somewhat above a nurse practitioner, but they could not perform any specialty services.

Most US hospitals could not operate without foreign trained doctors. Some are US born who could not get into US Med schools.

Bring on the Foreign Doctors--They’re just as good as the homegrown variety. So why don’t we let them practice here?

"More important than tests and subjective reviews are health outcomes. It’s difficult to measure the quality of a doctor by the health of her patients, since so much is beyond the physician’s control. If you compile a large enough sample, however, it becomes more likely that the correlations are, in fact, causations. In 2010, researchers looked at heart attack data in Pennsylvania over a four-year period, combining the death rates and time spent in the hospital for hundreds of thousands of patients. The study included 6,113 doctors, 24 percent of whom graduated from foreign medical schools. (That proportion approximates the widely cited statistic that 1 in 4 doctors practicing in the United States earned her medical degree abroad.)

The study found little difference between doctors who were both born and trained abroad and those who trained in U.S. medical schools. Cardiac patients managed by the foreign-born and foreign-trained doctors were slightly less likely to die, but spent slightly more time in the hospital than those treated by U.S.-trained doctors. A 2005 study in Canada—the only country whose doctors need not repeat their training to practice in the United States—also showed that international medical graduates produced similar results to domestically educated doctors."

"There was one other notable finding in the 2010 study: Doctors who were U.S. citizens, but trained abroad, produced the worst results. That result isn’t intuitively surprising. Many (but not all) Americans who go to med school abroad do so because they can’t get into a domestic school. That doesn’t make them stupid or hopeless, and some of them go on to become wonderful physicians. On average, however, they are lesser candidates, and domestic medical schools filtered them out."

You suspect correctly. Another sad reality is the quality MD’s who will retire early and those promising candidates who will say, “Screw This” and go into another profession.

The fact remains that no hospital would permit an unqualified physician to obtain speciality privileges. The public relations would be horrible, the hospital credentialing committee would reject the application, but the bottom line is that such a physician would be unable to get malpractice insurance.

You really haven't been paying much attention, have you? The Leftists will simply either change the laws so that hospitals MUST accept such applications, or they will threaten to fine those hospitals who do not accept underqualified doctors, just as they forced banks to take underqualified loan applications. Hospital boards will fold, just as the bank boards did.

(And currently, Eric Holder's "Justice" Dept is considering criminal charges against bank boards who do not start making loans to the underqualified once again, despite the bubble burst that they caused last time by simply threatening fines. They are NOT playing softball out there!!)

“You really haven’t been paying much attention, have you? The Leftists will simply either change the laws so that hospitals MUST accept such applications, or they will threaten to fine those hospitals who do not accept underqualified doctors, just as they forced banks to take underqualified loan applications. Hospital boards will fold, just as the bank boards did.”

Hospitals will not be able to absorb the malpractice costs associated with unqualified specialists. Instead, such a mandate would force the hospital to close the department or their entire operation.

You simply can’t expect hospitals and providers to operate at a loss and below basic practice standards. If the Leftists want hospitals and providers to act in such a fashion, they will need to directly takeover the nation’s hospitals and clinics and find their own delusional idiots to run them. Good luck on that. There are over 5800 hospitals and 834k physicians in the US.

So pay attention to this, there will be a backlash if the government actually tries to own and run their own hospitals and clinics.

“In 2010, researchers looked at heart attack data in Pennsylvania over a four-year period, combining the death rates and time spent in the hospital for hundreds of thousands of patients. The study included 6,113 doctors, 24 percent of whom graduated from foreign medical schools.”

The point I was making concerned speciality physicians. Your heart attack study did not indicate whether this was a review of primary care docs (internal medicine, primary care) vs specialists. I suspect that this was a review of non-specialists because cardiologists typically perform better than non cardiologists in heart attack management.

As far as specialists are concerned, I don’t think there wouldn’t probably be any substantial difference in performance between a cardiologist trained in Germany or France and practicing in the US vs US trained cardiologist. (provided that there are no linguistic barriers). However, there are residency training requirements in the US for specialists that cannot be easily overturned by federal fiat. Even if specialty medical boards waived requirements under pressure from the government, foreign trained physicians would still need to take exams in English. Moreover, the assumption that foreign trained specialists would want to practice in a country with an unstable and deteriorating healthcare system that reimburses doctors at ever lower rates, is open to question. Meanwhile, a cardiologist with 7 years of residency training and 25 years experience can retire in a minute. This deficit cannot be made up in the short run despite the Left’s efforts.

They ain’t seen nothing yet. Just wait until half the doctors, quit, retire, opt out, or undertake concierge medicine if they want to see REAL doctor shortages.

You don't seriously believe that the regime will permit them to "quit, retire, opt out, or undertake concierge medicine," do you?

What do you think all those executive orders have been about?

I don’t disagree with what you are saying. But the only way currently to make up the doctor shortage will be importing more foreign doctors. The specialties will suffer, but there will have to be changes made to the system. The quality of healthcare will go down, but that was a given with Obamacare anyway.

I checked the Medicaid website, no doctors are accepting it in my county

Doctors????? We don’t need no steeenkin’ doctors.