Tea at Trianon: Why America Faces a Doctor Shortage

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Why America Faces a Doctor Shortage

From the City Journal:

Health outcomes are adversely affected by the shortage. In lower-income areas, which are feeling the impact of too-few physicians already, patients are increasingly being treated by practitioners who attended for-profit medical schools in the Caribbean. These schools, known for their lower standards, are the kinds of institutions that LCME was founded in 1942 to police and prevent. Patients of such doctors tend to have higher mortality rates than those of physicians who attended medical school in the United States. Without the constraints imposed by LCME, more qualified doctors would be available. Medical schools would be free to experiment with ways to increase the supply of well-educated physicians through programs that integrate undergraduate education with medical education or that help accomplished nurses retrain as physicians.

LCME’s accrediting may not even be needed any more. The landscape of medical education in the U.S. has changed dramatically since 1942. Accreditation was necessary to reform substandard medical colleges in an era when such institutions could operate in isolation; that’s not possible today. Internet sites like Yelp, ZocDoc, and HealthGrades have made physician credentials and reputations easier to access and share than ever before. Under such constant scrutiny, it’s hard to imagine how medical schools could drastically lower their standards without anyone knowing. (Read more.)