The full story says that if all the new medical schools being planned actually open, there will be an 18% increase in capacity.

The total number of medical schools would be 131 while law schools number 200.

Many of the planned schools are associated with universities but not all are.

Supporters say there is a need for primary care. Detractors say other health care professionals, such as nurse practitioners, could fill the gap.

According to U. S. News and World Report:

• The population in American continues to grow, having easily passed the 300 million mark by January 1, 2009.

• There is one birth every eight seconds.

This story says that this is the first increase is spaces for medical students since the 1960s-1970s, saying that the new schools are due to a “rare convergence of forces.”

A Cautionary Comment

Regular readers know that the need for primary care physicians is not going to increase until it is possible to practice without paperwork hassles, lower pay and other negatives which make the specialty unappealing to many. When medical students graduate with six figure debt, they feel compelled to pick specialties which make it possible for them to pay this debt off and support their families.

We will not have more primary care doctors until the pay structure and the related issues, such as excess paperwork, are dealt with.

The New York Times

…”nearly two dozen medical schools that have recently opened or might open across the country, the most at any time since the 1960s and ’70s.

“These new schools are seeking to address an imbalance in American medicine that has been growing for a quarter century. Many bright students were fleeing to offshore medical schools, or giving up hope entirely, when they could not get into domestic schools. Meanwhile, American hospitals were using foreign-trained and foreign-born physicians to fill medical residencies. During the 1980s and ’90s only one new medical school was established. (Emphasis added)

“Huge numbers of qualified American kids were not getting into American medical schools or going abroad to study,” Dr. Lawrence G. Smith, dean of the proposed Hofstra University School of Medicine, in Hempstead, N.Y., which is not yet recruiting students, said last week. “I think it was a kind of wake-up call.”

“The proliferation of new schools is also a market response to a rare convergence of forces: a growing population; the aging of the health-conscious baby-boom generation; the impending retirement of, by some counts, as many as a third of current doctors; and the expectation that, the present political climate notwithstanding, changes in health care policy will eventually bring a tide of newly insured patients into the American health care system. (Emphasis added)

Source: New York Times, February 14, 2010