NY Times: Financing Physician Training

[MrsK]

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...ype=blogs&_r=0

Posted a couple days ago on NYTimes.com. This article discusses the current funding of GME. "Among other remedies, the committee recommended freezing funding at current levels while siphoning off a portion to medical education research. That recommendation, among others, has roused fierce debate and high-minded harangues from medical and hospital organizations." So, we should pay residents less? Have fewer residency positions?

[Pollyanna]

What kind of morons are on this committee? I'm telling you, doctors at all levels of training are next on the hit parade (cuz, you know they're just money hungry bastards )

[ladymoreta]

WTH? So these people were paid to do a study about the quality of medical education, and at the end their recommendation was that they pay residents less and suggest using the "excess" to pay for them to do more studies?

[SoonerTexan]

Ideally, the subsidies would be linked to how well trainees cared for patients and the extent to which they addressed not just a particular hospital’s needs, but regional and national health care priorities.

Yeah, that's going to be real fun given 2/3 of DH's patients are VA or public hospital.

[SoonerTexan]

Given the fact that a disproportionate amount of current funding goes to institutions “in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts,”

That is interesting, though those are really high population areas. It was kind of a known fact last year that NY had a ton of shitty radiology programs that didn't do a great job of teaching their residents and were basically in it for the cheap labor. So maybe there is something to that.

But if they really want more primary care spots, why not just increase residency spots in those areas alone? It's not like they wont fill!

Still, Laurie really summarized it the best.

[wiva]

I didn't get that out of the article. I didn't see mention of lowering residents' salaries, just of finding ways to make hospitals more accountable for how they spend the $10,000,000,000 that they receive to train physicians. I didn't see any mention of cutting residency positions, either. It sounds like this committee just discovered an alarming lack of organization and accountability and is trying to sort it out so that money is being utilized effectively and not just being wasted.

If this article were written about $10 billion being given to any other industry and then just disappearing with zero accountability, I think we'd all as taxpayers agree that it would be nice to know how it's being spent.

[SoonerTexan]

If the money is cut, I'd bet that residents salaries would go first. The spots will fill no matter how bad the pay is. Just reading between the lines

[MrsK]

If the money is cut, I'd bet that residents salaries would go first. The spots will fill no matter how bad the pay is. Just reading between the lines

This. The article doesn't come out and say it but the undercurrent was that residents should not be paid for poor work. IDK how they are measuring that work.

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[ides]

This. The article doesn't come out and say it but the undercurrent was that residents should not be paid for poor work. IDK how they are measuring that work.

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I got that as well. I also got that they have no plan to increase residency positions.

[rain_dancer]

"But the hospitals were under no obligation to Medicare to account for ... The places where their trainees eventually opend practices and the percentage of Medicare and Medicaid patients those graduates accepted into those practices." "Training programs who produced doctors who ...eventually practiced in under served areas ...would, for example, be eligible for more funding."

I find so much wrong with just these two quotes that I don't even know where to begin. Of course they had no obligation to report where their graduates practiced and what kind of patients they see in their practices - it's none of their business! They train doctors, and then the doctors move on and start their careers! The idea of penalizing programs and their future residents for something they have absolutely zero control over is absurd.

But by all means, instead of "throwing money at the past" as the title states GME is doing, let's throw money at more research instead, since the 2 years of research that produced this article was SOOOO insightful and valuable to the future of medical training.