(Not Enough Residency Slots!)
Some medical students refer to it, per Kaiser Health News’s Ankita Rao, as the “jaws of death.” What it shows are the number of medical student graduates going up and up — as the number of residencies stays relatively stagnant.
Who is to blame for the gap between medical school graduates and residency slots? As with many things these days, it’s largely Congress. When legislators passed the balanced budget amendment in 1996, it capped the number of residencies that Medicare can fund. Since then, hospitals’ slots have been tethered to 1996 levels.
The Affordable Care Act did take some steps to address this: It has put $167 million toward funding about 1,000 new residency slots under a new Primary Care Residency Expansion program (you can read more about that here). While those new slots do expand the overall pool of residencies, when you put them in the context of a 15,000 residency slot gap, some describe the program as a “drop in the bucket.”
In the health policy world, there tend to be two schools of thought about how to address this problem. One, perhaps the most intuitive, is to fund more residency slots. This is what legislation from Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Penn.) and Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) would have done. The Resident Physician Shortage Reduction and Graduate Medical Education Accountability and Transparency Act would have eliminated the cap on residency funding altogether.
Another way to close the gap: Bring down the the number of medical school graduates, and look for other health-care workers who can provide many of the most basic services. This is an idea that was advanced by Linda Green, a mathematician at Columbia University who recently published a Health Affairs study on the topic.
One more thing for premed students to freak out about
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