EDITORIAL: There are never too many doctors

HUP shouldn't participate in the federal program that asks teaching hospitals to cut residency positions. The role of the government, though, is not to take away opportunities from ambitious doctors-in-training. And that should certainly not be the role of a university. Although the $100,000 the government is offering for every doctor not trained may at first seem tempting to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, administrators should should reject the program on the grounds that it contradicts the very mission of a university. Penn has a strong tradition in training specialists and regularly attracts top-notch graduating medical students for its residency programs. If the University began cutting the number of residents in these speciality training programs, it won't necessarily ease the alleged overabundance of doctors in America. Residents applying to Penn would instead apply to other top-ranked schools that are not cutting their residency programs. Instead of eliminating openings for residents, new programs should be developed to encourage doctors to take up practice in those areas of America where doctors typically shy away from. While middle-class suburbanites may have little difficulty finding a physician within a 15-minute drive, many Americans in the rural countryside have few options. A lower-class coal miner in southern West Virginia, for example, may have to travel hours in order to find a doctor with qualifications that match his needs. Many families living in inner-city America face similar problems. Instead of setting up a practice in the poorer neighborhoods of New York, for example, young doctors are more apt to move out to Long Island or northern New Jersey, where the clientele is more affluent. The government should be encouraging universities and hospitals to develop internship and residency programs that strive to solve these problems. The very money that is now rewarding schools for eliminating training programs could instead be passed on to those medical schools and hospitals that are trying to devise such programs. Taking the money may be the easy thing to do, but it is also the wrong thing to do. The government and the medical community have a responsibility to address the problems many Americans have in finding adequate health care. Eliminating residency programs will not have that effect. After all, no one has ever died from a "glut" of doctors.