Salute efforts to educate new doctors
Critics have pounced on efforts by Jim Costa and Dennis Cardoza, a pair of Congressional Democrats from the Central Valley, to scare up funding for a medical school at UC Merced.
Costa and Cordoza renewed their call for a Central California medical school, opponents say, only to provide cover for their support of the controversial, Democrat-authored health care reform bill that passed in Congress this month. And yes, there's certainly some truth to that claim.
Any funding for a new medical school at UC Merced, or any other place in the valley, hinges on a number of factors, few if any of them directly addressed by the health care bill, critics say. True again.
The bill language the refers to funding of a medical school does not identify any institution by name, and it does not guarantee any delivery of funding. It merely authorizes $100 million a year for the next five years -- but requires that Congress continue to appropriate the money every year.
"There are no guarantees," Cardoza, who represents the Merced area, told The Sacramento Bee last week.
Well, there is one guarantee: The nation already faces severe shortages of physicians, nurses and other health-care providers, a problem that was certain to grow more acute even before health-care legislation dramatically expanding the rolls of the insured took a big step toward enactment.
The situation in rural California is even more dire. A recent report from the California HealthCare Foundation warns that the shortage of primary-care physicians will cause critical shortages across the state, even greater than the AMA has suggested. Among the areas where the problem is most acute: the Central Valley, where an aging physician workforce, coupled with difficulties recruiting new doctors, spells trouble in the years ahead.
Critics are correct that the health-legislation add-on pushed by Cardoza and Costa doesn't solve the physician shortage. Critics are correct that the bill merely offers funds to build medical schools in federally designated "health professional shortage areas," which may or may not pay off with a facility near Merced, which is in one of 6,000 regions so designated nationwide.
But it's a step. And as Cardoza told The Bee, "We've received assurances from the (House) speaker and the White House that they understand this is an imperative."
It would be a mistake to count on the tentative promise of a medical school in the Central Valley as the answer to our physician shortage. The solution lies in a range of actions, including emphasizing science and math in our schools, establishing incentives for med-school students to pursue general medicine rather than specialties, and active recruitment in areas with a greater number of candidates.
But it makes no sense to disparage the efforts of two Central Valley congressmen who are trying to tackle the problem on one ambitious front.
