Why We Can't Blame Cuba For Our Doctor Shortages

[Mika]

Why We Can't Blame Cuba For Our Doctor Shortages

[div class="excerpt" style="margin-left: 2em; border: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius: 0.4615em; box-shadow: 3px 3px 3px #999999;"]
But before Americans, and especially Floridians, scold Brazil, we should consider our own looming and inexcusable physician shortage. Florida, in fact, might as well be Brazil. When the state legislature approved a medical school at Florida International University in 2006, it pointed out that Miami was then the nation’s second largest metropolitan area without a public medical school. Florida needed to license 2,500 new physicians annually to keep up with demand, yet it graduated only 500 medical students a year.

The situation hasn’t improved much today: 16 Florida counties still have fewer than seven doctors per 10,000 residents compared to 22 per 10,000 for the U.S. as a whole. But don’t think the country isn’t in trouble, either.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, the U.S. is staring at a shortage of 100,000 physicians by 2020. The problem will be especially acute in poor rural pockets. Not coincidentally, the Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported that the number of medical scholarships offered by the federal government’s National Health Service Corps has dropped from 6,159 in 1981 to 250 today.

I wouldn’t suggest we alleviate the U.S. shortage by recruiting Cuban doctors (though it’s always amused me how U.S. pols like those in the Cuban-American caucus vilify the quality of Cuban docs who work abroad but then suddenly extol their skills when they defect). But railing at Cuban doctors doesn’t fix our problem, either -- just as recruiting them won’t solve Brazil’s problem.

Brazil has apparently decided that a Cuban doctor out in the Amazon is better than no doctor at all out in the Amazon. But that’s a lame healthcare policy -- and Florida and the U.S. need to be mindful of that too.

More --> http://wlrn.org/post/why-we-cant-blame-cuba-our-doctor-shortages

[Judi Lynn]

1. Oh, jeez! I've heard Miami has more plastic surgeons than you can shake a stick at!

[center][/center]
I wouldn't touch them with a 9 feet pole!

Going where the big bucks are is what the heck happened.

No one wants to invest all that much money in his/her education, or take out humongous loans unless he/she can be assured of making the colossal incomes, it appears.

In Cuba, people STILL go into medicine because they WANT to assist life, to promote healing, to improve people's quality of life in ways that lift them up above helpless suffering.

The clowns in Venezuela also threw the same gibbering at the government when it was decided that the poor of Venezuela were going to get medical treatment, too, for the FIRST TIME. Greedy bastards are the same everywhere, aren't they?

It really makes good people feel like barfing realizing such malignant personalities are still among us. They are the disease in the world's body.

The thought that there are actually people working in the world to help OTHERS, NOT THEMSELVES FIRST has to just drive them insane. So do they take time to think it over, and ponder their own morals? HELL, NO!
They try to revile the ones who are doing the right thing. Oh, my shrieking god.

[Mika]

2. The wingnut view gets the press. The lefties, ignored. eom