As More Foreign Doctors Land Residencies,
Americans Left Looking For Work
By Doug Medina
For years, the Association of American Medical Colleges has predicted the United States will face a large physician shortage, and the coronavirus pandemic may further exacerbate this shortage.
However, there are thousands of qualified U.S. doctors who are unable to practice. Every year, about 1,000 American citizens graduate medical schools in the U.S. but don’t move onto a residency at a teaching hospital because they don’t “match,” according to the National Resident Matching Program, the organization that controls this process. Without matching into residency, doctors cannot practice medicine.
I’m one of those doctors ready to help during this current pandemic, but can’t. Even though I graduated from Georgetown University School of Medicine in good standing, earning honors in five clinical rotations, I have not matched into residency.
My path to a top-tier medical school in our nation’s capital started at the University of Colorado, where I earned a degree in biochemistry. After college, I received a grant to work at the Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal Materials Research Center in Colorado. My hard work and study ethic helped me score in the 90th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test. I was accepted to Georgetown, which receives about 10,000 applications per year and only selects about 200 candidates.
Since graduating from Georgetown in 2011, I passed the United States Medical Licensing Exam, a requirement to become a licensed physician. But while I am a nationally licensed physician in the U.S., I can’t practice medicine because I don’t have a license number due to never getting a residency position.
This is happening every year to too many U.S. doctors.
Since 2011, I worked with Floating Doctors, an international nonprofit organization in Central America. In 2014, I published research from the Research Institute on Addictions. After 2014, I received grants to work as an extern under supervising psychiatrists at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the first federally operated mental health hospital, and the Veteran’s Administration Mental Health Clinic in Washington, D.C. I’ve worked jobs in electronic medical records and as an intake clinician admitting patients at a mental health hospital. I’ve had nine supervisors give me high marks and provide letters of recommendation.
To obtain my medical degree, I incurred a debt of over $50,000 per year in federal student loans to pay tuition at Georgetown. With an interest rate of 6.7 percent, my student loans accrue interest of more than $25,000 annually and have ballooned to more than $460,000. Even with my job as an intake clinician earning $30 an hour, and paying my student loans via an Income-Driven Repayment plan, I’m not even able to afford to pay the accruing monthly interest on my student loans.
In March, more than 1,200 U.S. medical seniors did not match into residency. In addition, an untold number of prior medical graduates didn’t match. In fact, each year, upwards of 2,000 current-year grads and prior-year graduates don’t match.
Yet just this year, 4,222 non-U.S. citizen international medical graduates from medical schools outside the U.S. were provided medical residencies, which are largely funded by U.S. taxpayers (via Medicare funding). In fact, each year since 2011, the year I graduated, the number of international medical graduates receiving U.S. residencies has increased – from 2,721 in 2011 to more than 4,200 in 2020, a total of more than 36,000 foreign doctors in a ten-year period.
To ensure fairness to American citizens, a simple solution is to prioritize U.S. graduates. This may mean a lower number of foreign doctors receiving residency positions, but in this current pandemic, doctors are needed in their home countries. For instance, India currently has a shortage of 600,000 doctors.
Institutions that should do more to help American doctors achieve their goals work against them. That includes the powerful, influential American Medical Association, which has been lobbying to issue more employment-based visas, like the H-1B and the J-1.
U.S. medical students go through a highly rigorous process to get one of the coveted first-year slots. We have a reasonable expectation that when we graduate medical school, we’ll practice our chosen profession. To be shut out while foreign nationals are hired violates America’s social contract with its citizens.
There are reasonable solutions to address this serious problem that is ruining thousands of American lives per year. The governing medical organizations, universities and our elected officials must right this wrong.
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Copyright 2020 by Dr. Doug Medina, distributed by the Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate
Medina is a graduate of Georgetown University School of Medicine and advocates for ensuring U.S. doctors in good standing receive residency status in order to practice medicine. Contact Medina at info@doctorswithoutjobs.org.
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I agree with you completely. I have written to Stand for America to Senator Nikki Haley 4 weeks ago to extend visa banned to all foreigners, including foreign medical graduates. America must serve Americans not give away our future to foreigners. AMA have always fought for foreigners and never American citizens. They should change their name from American Medical Association to Foreigner Medical Association.
Please write to Senator Nikki Haley. You can search for Stand for America to reach her staff. American Citizens need protection from Foreign medical graduates who have no resistance to steal our residency jobs and to attain citizenship.
I had suggested that the entire residency application process must be changed. That only proven US citizens can apply and undergo the residency interview season from mid September until the end of February for the match in early March. That only after the match has been announced and the scramble week for the unfilled programs is to begin in mid March, should foreign medical graduates be allowed to apply.
This would maximize the opportunities for all American medical graduates, who studied domestically or internationally. Meanwhile, topping off any unfilled positions to foreign grads.
This is the only way for America to protect Americans. Please spread the word. We need an organization for all US citizen medical graduates and to bring this to Congress’s attention.
You fail to mention critical things like your GPA in Georgetown or how many of your teachers there gave you letters of rec, and your birth certificate won’t make you a better doctor. I don’t see why I and other Americans, who already pay so much for their health care, should be forced to receive care from sub-par graduates just because you happened to be raised in ‘Murica. You have been forced to compete against other medical graduates that turned out to have even better grades, recommendations, and interviews than you – and been found wanting. This is what capitalism looks like buddy, where we get to select the best of the best and you-are-not-it. There are lots of people who are, unfortunately, judged by their race or birthright, but you are upset that you are being judged by your grades and attitudes instead? Wow. Whining doesn’t make you a better doctor. Your entitlement is showing. Maybe you can find work in one of the other countries that also need doctors, because we only take the best. Or maybe you will find a way to shine that’s not just waving around your birth certificate.
America is land of the free, and you should be rewarded based on your merits and qualities you bring to the table, not your citizenship and ethnicity. The fact that you’re home grown and still can’t secure residency really speaks about your failure to improve on your weaknesses and strive to become a qualified physician. There are alot of FMGs who are highly qualified but cannot secure residency, and here you are crying about it despite all the benefits and advantages you have over foreigners including lower cut off USMLE scores and still fail at it. Why should patients have to deal with under qualified US doctors such as yourself? They deserve better service from highly qualified FMGs.
Apply to the small rural program and you will succeed.