Posted on 02/15/2010 6:05:43 AM PST by UAConservative
Peter Allen applied to 30 medical schools after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh last year. Twenty-eight said no.
Of the two that said yes, one had something in common with Mr. Allen: It, too, was starting out in medicine. He enrolled in the inaugural class of The Commonwealth Medical College in Scranton, Pa.
“I was ecstatic that I had been accepted to a medical school,” Mr. Allen said, adding that he would have gone for a master’s in bioengineering if he had not been accepted. “It’s a giant sigh of relief; it secures your plans for the rest of your life really.”
The Commonwealth is one of nearly two dozen medical schools that have recently opened or might open across the country, the most at any time since the 1960s and ’70s.
These new schools are seeking to address an imbalance in American medicine that has been growing for a quarter century. Many bright students were fleeing to offshore medical schools, or giving up hope entirely, when they could not get into domestic schools. Meanwhile, American hospitals were using foreign-trained and foreign-born physicians to fill medical residencies. During the 1980s and ’90s only one new medical school was established.
“Huge numbers of qualified American kids were not getting into American medical schools or going abroad to study,” Dr. Lawrence G. Smith, dean of the proposed Hofstra University School of Medicine, in Hempstead, N.Y., which is not yet recruiting students, said last week. “I think it was a kind of wake-up call.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Never doubt the invisible hand. The free market system always works.
Too bad these kids will get into medical school and graduate into healthcare.
ruefully
A few years ago I was looking into affirmative action admissions in med schools and unfortunately found that it was alive and well there too. I’d bet Peter Allen didn’t get into other med schools because he was a white male even though in aggregate males score better than females on MCAT. The fact that he got into Pitt suggests his MCAT score was pretty good.
Things look brighter for physicians with the likely demise of Obama care. Had Obamacare passed physicians would have had government bureaucrats telling them how to practice medicine, who to treat and how much treatment would be allowed. Medical specialties in neonatal care and geriatrics would have disappeared and been replaced by death panels.
No doubt these new Medical Schools will teach “Cross Cultural Medicine” “Holistic Health” and “Transgender Anatomy” rather than the traditional Gross anatomy, Human Physiology, and Physical Diagnosis.
Many of the current schools do a crappy job of teaching Physical diagnosis as it is, judging by what I see in young physicians. Why should they listen to a patient’s heart or perform a neurologic exam? Just order an Echocardiogram or a CT scan of the head.
I’m all for the free market system, but we don’t let market forces determine the number of physicians who are practicing—obviously many more people would go to medical school if space were available. Instead of market forces, we let organizations like the AMA have an influential role in determining the number of doctors, since every medical school must be approved by the AMA to be certified. There are those who say that the AMA has a vested interest in keeping the supply of doctors low.
As a result, we have a situation where in my city of 500,000 people it takes a month to get in to see an orthopedic surgeon, and the city council must pay a neurologist $2,000 a night just to be available to take emergency calls.
Another problem is that over 50% of medical school students are now female - and studies have shown that female doctors work on average about 60% of the hours of their male colegues over their professional lifetime so you have to train almost 2 females for every male to get the same lifetime production.
Specialization is also a problem as students are not stupid and quickly realize that the specialists make about twice what a generalist makes so we are seeing a proliferation of less-qualified “physician extenders” in essence practicing medicine - dumbing down the profession. Instead of college, med. school and three or more years of residency for physicians, we now promote PA’s who have little actually hands on training with diagnosis/treatment skills!
Kind of like letting the student pilot who just soloed fly you and your family to Europe in a 767!
There's your answer as to why the proliferation of med schools. They are being trained from day one to be government bureaucrats beholden to their masters in DC. I guess they have not done a business cost analysis of their lengthy education and lost production as compared to another career. What I don't understand yet is why anyone would spend another seven to ten years in training after college to be paid what socialist doctors make.
A couple years ago I dated a girl who was in med school. She told me that some med schools’ admissions processes favor admitting practicing homosexuals as some sort of “minority.” Please note, I never verified this, but it unfortunately sounds like the sort of lunacy you’d expect from some in academia these days.
I would not be surprised if some admissions offices treated them that way. However what most don’t know (or won’t admit) is that the largest beneficiary of affirmative action are white females. It not that there aren’t plenty of females who score well but there are many more males who do. I found that most med schools are going for a 50/50 mix of sexes which means the average male has to score much higher than a female to secure a spot over her.
The University of Pittsburgh has a top med school (Applicants accepted: 8.9%, Average MCAT: 10.7, Average GPA (4.0 scale): 3.68) yet the Male/Female ratio is 49%/51%.
Guilds like the medical organizations have no free market.
The healthcare bill is requiring that more than fifty percent of med students be either minorities or foreign. The schools are ramping up to take them. There is, of course, monies involved.
Spoke to a doctor yesterday about this subject This is not the long hand of the free market.
Guilds like the medical organizations have no free market.
The healthcare bill is requiring that more than fifty percent of med students be either minorities or foreign. The schools are ramping up to take them. There is, of course, monies involved.
Spoke to a doctor yesterday about this subject This is not the long hand of the free market.
Guilds like the medical organizations have no free market.
The healthcare bill is requiring that more than fifty percent of med students be either minorities or foreign. The schools are ramping up to take them. There is, of course, monies involved.
Spoke to a doctor yesterday about this subject This is not the long hand of the free market.
Guilds like the medical organizations have no free market.
The healthcare bill is requiring that more than fifty percent of med students be either minorities or foreign. The schools are ramping up to take them. There is, of course, monies involved.
Affirmative Action. They will be idiots with M.D. after their names. Unless you areeady to die,stay away from them.
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