India Ink: America Is Stealing the World's Doctors

Kunj Desai, a Zambian-born doctor of Indian descent, now practices in Newark, New Jersey, where salaries are nearly ten times that at home, and he is surrounded by modern facilities.

?In a globalized economy, the countries that pay the most and offer the greatest chance for advancement tend to get the top talent,? Matt McAllester writes in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

South America?s soccer players migrate to Europe, high-tech workers from India and China go the United States, he writes, and ?the United States, with its high salaries and technological innovation, is also the world?s most powerful magnet for doctors, attracting more every year than Britain, Canada and Australia ? the next most popular destinations for migrating doctors ? combined.?

The Council on Physician and Nurse Supply estimates that in 10 years, the United States could have a shortage of 200,000 doctors. Already, one in four doctors working in this country is trained in a medical school overseas (though this includes some American doctors who attended medical school outside the United States). American medical schools are producing more graduates, but many of them will become specialists who can command better pay. The demand for primary-care doctors is expected to stay high, perpetuating the demand for foreign medical graduates.

Even in the unlikely event that American medical schools produce more general practitioners, nothing but legislation would prevent American hospitals from cherry-picking the most promising young doctors the world has to offer, according to Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. ?If you can take from an applicant pool from the whole planet, why would you only take from Americans?? Garrett said. ?For the foreseeable future, every health provider, from Harvard University?s facilities all the way down to a rural clinic in the Ethiopian desert, is competing for medical talent, and the winners are those with money.?

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ccaf09c83ba23d5aa7336db9af92e396

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