Should I Approve My Tax Dollars to do That: Import Health Care

While most career fields in the United States experienced job loss during the recession, the health care sector added 1.2 million jobs, a lone “bright spot in the economy”. Yet an NY Times Op-Ed Column alerted me to a disheartening reality. To fill the demand for new health care professionals, we are not educating and employing our own. Instead, we are importing them.

The demand for more health care workers arose in part from changes imposed by Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act and the aging of the Baby Boomers.  However, American medical schools have not responded with an increased output of M.D.s. They still reject hundreds of thousands of qualified applicants while we fill the need for doctors by importing foreigners who now comprise twelve percent of the health work force. In 2011-2012, 43,919 students applied to US medical schools. While that number does not differentiate between domestic and international students,  only 19,230 students actually matriculated (https://www.aamc.org/download/153708/data/charts1982to2012.pdf). The author of the Times article, Kate Tulenko, argues that in doing so, we are also taking doctors away from the areas that really need them. Countries where twenty percent of children die before their first birthday should not be losing health care workers to the United States. Leave those doctors to do a job that for many is a matter of life and death and start increasing the production of our own.

As someone pursuing a career in medicine, the ability to get into (and consequently pay for) school is a big concern. Though I plan to enter veterinary school, applicants across pre-health fields face the same dilemmas of completing mile-long lists of requirements, achieving impossibly high test scores and GPAs in order to be competitive and extraordinary volunteer work, extracurricular activities, internships or research so yours stands out among the myriad of applications. Such glitter, if you will, often requires two things: money and connections.

 Politics and financial status should be irrelevant when it comes to health care. Good health care entails a patient and his/her doctor devising preventative, maintenance and recovery plans that best suit the patients needs. Yet a paper application ignores that necessary quality. For example, it is pointless to prescribe insulin to a diabetic patient in rural Mississippi if she does not own a fridge to store it in. The doctor must figure out a more creative, unorthodox approach. She (the patient) frankly will not know or care if her doctor had a 4.0 GPA as an undergraduate or achieved a perfect score on the MCAT. She will just want to feel better.

I wholeheartedly support the exchange of techniques, theories, and developments across nation lines. But I have a real problem with the fact that the US has imported and is importing tens of thousands of health care workers while there are thousands more already here ready to take the Hippocratic oath. The Federal Government needs to apply more pressure on medical schools and state regulators to increase the number of teaching hospitals, increase class size and reduce the cost of a health profession education. Everyone has the right to adequate health care. But first, they need access to the people. Thus even before we facilitate the access, we need the people.

So in asking myself whether I approve my tax dollars to import health care, my answer is no. I want more of my tax dollars devoted to encouraging the education and output of American health care workers.

Think about it: what do you want from your doctor?