Problems and Promises: The Potential Impact of Graduate Medical Education Reform

While discussion of health care reform has centered on the critical issues of how to achieve universal coverage and how to pay for health care in the future, policy analysts and lawmakers have appropriately turned their attention to the structures underlying the health care system, one of which is the physician workforce. There is now virtually unanimous agreement that our medical education system is turning out too few generalist physicians, too many specialists, and too many doctors altogether. A number of solutions to this problem have been proposed, ranging from what may be characterized as a laissez-faire reliance on so-called market forces (Cooper 1994; Dranove and White 1994) to the imposition of a new federal regulatory apparatus that would determine the number and distribution of positions in graduate medical education (Council on Graduate Medical Education 1994; Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation 1993; Physician Payment Review Commission 1993, 1994; Rivo and Satcher 1993).

Author(s): David Altman; Jordan J. Cohen

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Volume 72, Issue 4 (pages 719–723)
Published in 1994