re: Trump on Healthcare: "Who Knew?"

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the reason Medical salaries are so high is that the AMA

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Part of the problem stems from the funding mechanism for Graduate Medical Education (GME). Medicare covers the majority of the cost teaching hospitals spend on training medical residents, but the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 capped the number of residency slots the federal government would fund. The shortfall-what is not covered by the Federal government-is paid for by the hospitals where residents train. While it is possible to increase the number of residents they train, to do so, hospitals must fund the entire cost of those training positions.

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In a plan that health experts greeted as brilliant and bizarre, Federal regulators announced yesterday that for the next six years they would pay New York State hospitals not to train physicians.

Just as the Federal Government for many years paid corn farmers to let fields lie fallow, 41 of New York's teaching hospitals will be paid $400 million to not cultivate so many new doctors, their main cash crop.

The plan's primary purpose is to stem a growing surplus of doctors in parts of the nation, as well as to save Government money. But the payments are manna to New York's cash-starved hospitals, which are struggling to trim the size of their staffs and adapt to the world of managed care.

The plan required no Congressional action and thus was not debated by senators and representatives from other states.

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