Rep. Jim MCDERMOTT at Sebelius' Q&A?!

I loved him at Sebe's Q&A..he was using O's plan to provide almost free medical education (ala Cuba) in and new coming medical students would have to spend 4 years residency in areas that are in direct need of medical care. It would fully balance out O's not only community initiative plan but it would compliment the public option. New med students, providing low cost but quality health education and hands on practical experience in order to get fully qualified and functional medical working force sent out across the nations. It will be like Teach America almost but with doctors.

I'm surprised no one mentioned it...it was one of the most brilliant plans proposed at Sebelius' Q&A with the Health Reform committee.

For the hearing-impaired posters...because I realize this was a problem at a video post...


Jim MCDERMOTT: But I want to talk about Healthcare at the moment. Whichitaw (?), Kansas has 90 specialists for 100,000 people where as Boston has 180 specialists per 100,000 people. Everyone who has looked at those situations knows that, that doesn't mean they have better health care in Boston than they have in Wichitaw (?). What it reflects is the lack of primary care physicians in the Boston area, which they found out when they started asking. They couldn't provide mass primary care physicians for everybody who was asking for one. I made a proposal that we have ALL PUBLIC MEDICAL SCHOOLS BE FREE with the requirement that the students when they come out would serve four years in primary care in the State and one of the things that the Dartmouth Study (which I'm not sure is) shown--the Dartmouth University study--is that there is clearly, um, no connection between how many specialists you have and the quality of health care or anything except where people want to live in terms of where they practice. Now if you train them in Kansas and they move to San Francisco. You, the people of Kansas, have got nothing (reminds me of brain drain the US, Canada and Western European countries did and are doing to developing nations-Vabby)Washington State is part of Wammy (?)---Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming---we train all the doctors in one medical school. But they don't necessarily go back to the rural areas. With that kind of provision, I hope that what comes out of the provision when the President puts out his additional, uh, provisions is a mission that looks at workforce comission, a permanent comission for workforce planning. The..Right now, we have a graduate medical commission but that only deals with specialists. It does not deal with a broader issue of how you get enough private practitioners to get into the whole area primary care and I would like to hear your ideas having been a Governor and delivered a state having operated way below the national average. Actually, one half below the national average, there's only two other cities that have below the average of Wichitaw, and that's Sue City, Iowa and Mason (?), Arizona. So I'd like to hear how you did it.

I thought his proposal was brilliant.

Edited: for numbers correction.

Are you sure the numbers are correct? You sure it's not 180 per 100,000? No way that the general public is more than 60% specialist physicians.

n/t