Training New Doctors

Here's an interesting post from a blog titled "The Gloves Are Off".

Read it  --  then please follow link to original.
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http://gloverman.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/training-new-doctors.html

Training New Doctors

I learned something new the other day - something I'm surprised I didn't know before.  It came up in an article in Bloomberg:

With a shortage of doctors in the U.S. already and millions of new patients set to gain coverage under President

One major reason: The residency programs to train new doctors are largely paid for by the federal government, and the number of students accepted into such programs has been capped at the same level for 15 years. Medical schools are holding back on further expansion because the number of applicants for residencies already exceeds the available positions, according to the National Resident Matching Program, a 60-year-old Washington-based nonprofit that oversees the program.
....

The cost of training one new resident, meanwhile, has grown to about $145,000 a year, said Atul Grover, chief public policy officer for the Washington-based medical colleges group.

There’s no easy solution. Boosting the number of taxpayer-financed training slots beyond 85,000 would require Congress to allocate money at a time of contentious budget debates. Adding private financing means tapping new sources of cash, such as from health insurers. Importing doctors from overseas is controversial. And training doctors is long-term work, taking as many as 10 years.
....

Teaching hospitals pick up the funding for about 10,000 positions annually, Grover said in a telephone interview.

So let me get this straight.  Currently, the Federal government fund about 90% of the cost of training new doctors at a cost of $12 billion per year?  The health care industry itself only picks up 10% of the cost?  

I would love to know how this state of affairs got to where it is.  I can't think of another major profession - other than those that are exclusively government professions (military, police, firemen, etc.) where the government pays such a huge amount of training costs for its key personnel.  It's actually kind of mind-boggling.

I have two other questions.  I am assuming that the bulk of these costs are compensation paid to the residents, such as it is.  According to this website, resident salaries range from $40k to $67k in New York City.  I would imagine they are lower elsewhere in the US.  And as a rule of thumb, benefits may be another 25% to 30% above that.  What makes up the difference between this and the $145k average cost cited in the report?

And second, don't hospitals actually charge for the services of residents?  Are those revenues just nothing but pure profit, since the costs are picked up by the government?

And the only answer they have to solving the doctor shortage problem is to have the government fund more of the costs of residencies.

I will say that some of the loudest harumpfers I know in response to the "you didn't build that" meme are doctors.

Yeah, right.