Not Enough Doctors
July 30, 2007
Last week (or maybe longer ago than that), Yahoo! News reported a frightening trend in the United States - that being a shortage of doctors, specifically in rural areas. A shortage of doctors, not in Kenya, Laos, or even the U.K., although I’m sure those countries have their own problems. A large part of the problem in the U.S. is onerous restrictions on immigration:
Doctors recruited from places such as India, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa to work in underserved areas like the Mississippi Delta and the lonesome West already face an arduous and expensive gauntlet of agencies, professional tests and background checks to secure work papers and permanent residency.”
This is nothing new, and as Aaron Kinney explains, it is not a problem local only to doctors (or engineers, or landscapers, or busboys), there is a genuine shortage of workers:
If there wasn’t, then there wouldn’t be so many immigrants flocking here! The main reason that there are so many immigrants coming to the US year after year, decade after decade, is because there are still so many human resource shortages in the US.
But Dr. Sampatkumar Shivangi, despite his own experiences - according to the article, “He once tried unsuccessfully to help a J-1 physician find a position with a rural Mississippi clinic,” maintains that the federal government can’t be blamed for the problem.
Some of the physicians in that community didn’t want a physician to come and practice there because it would take away patients.
And who’s in charge of licensing? Oh, right. People who are already Doctors. Hiding behind the force of law, backed by government guns. I’m curious to know who else there is to blame? Do you think this problem will just go away, if we replace what’s left of a private health-care market with a single-payer system?
Previous knowledge drop on immigration (not Doctor-specific).
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