The US government will pay for medical school if you agree to locate in under-served areas. The problem is that people sign up for the program, take the benefits, and then refuse to go where they promised and have to be hounded to pay back the money.
Greed is the problem.
]]>The only HMO model that works is the Mayo Clinic/Kaiser Permanente model, where doctors are salaried employees and the employer is set up as a not-for-profit corporation and you have to go to one of their hospitals or clinics for care. Once you throw profit into the equation, or try to open it up to J. Random Doctor somewhere not under direct control of the HMO, the advantages in cost of the K-P model or of quality with the Mayo Clinic model goes away. Unfortunately that includes everybody who has an “HMO” today other than K-P or Mayo Clinic… the K-P / Mayo model simply has not scaled to outside of their own very special environments, and everybody else has screwed it up trying to re-implement it but with profit involved. When it comes to healthcare, profit screws up everything. Sigh!
– Badtux the Medical Penguin
.-= last blog ..Epic fail =-.