More Residency Slots Proposed

There was a well-reasoned op-ed in the NYT this past week on an amendment being proposed to Congress to add fifteen thousand medical residency slots to the hundred thousand residencies the federal government now finances. The point the writers make is that increasing the supply of physicians across the board is much less strategic than training primary care physicians (PCPs) specifically and remunerating those PCPs such that they continue to practice. The piece is written by Shannon Brownlee, the author of “Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer” and David Goodman, a professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. Here is the article.