Rural Health Care & Doctor Drain

[CornField]

Curious if you've had opportunity to read the doctor drain piece I wrote for Iowa Independent (published Friday afternoon) and what your thoughts are on how we can turn the situation around.

http://iowaindependent.com/12606/doctor-drain-threatens-rural-health-care

[47of74]

1. They give some good suggestions

A couple things I thought of were to maybe set new doctors up with older doctors, have some sort of mentoring thing going on where they take on more and more responsibility until the old doctor retires and the new doctor takes over the practice. Also have something like housing assistance for new doctors. Maybe communities will help match the downpayment on a home or match the first year's payments dollar for dollar because it's my understanding that the way mortages work if you pay a lot more than needed in the first year it'll greatly reduce the amount of time needed to pay off a mortage.

[cyberswede]

2. Very interesting article!

I've forwarded it liberally around to Medical Education folks I know. :)

[rurallib]

3. I will be out of step here but

one of the things that is seldom talked about when discussing universal HC is what to do about doctor training and the cost of it. I believe that if a universal single payer system were to somehow sneak in then medical education should be picked up by the government. Along with that there MAY (emphasis MAY not must) be some placement of doctors where they are needed. But that is very pie in the sky.
For today, perhaps there could be some kind of contracted clinic/time share approach to get doctors from DM and IC etc to staff clinics in rural towns. There could be a local support staff with the large hospitals from nearby cities supplying doctors on a contract basis. Wouldn't be a single specific doctor all the time, but may be limited to maybe 4 or five for a specific town.
I know western Iowa may be hard to cover. IIRC It was this very situation in Alberta province in Canada that led to their provincial attempt at state run single payer. This eventually led to the current canadian medicare system