US facing a 'preventable' disaster that puts security at risk: conservative

The U.S. is staring down a looming disaster that could explode into a "national security threat," one conservative writer warned for The Hill, but one that is also entirely "preventable."

John Mac Ghlionn is a conservative writer and researcher described as focusing on "culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life." On Saturday, he published an op-ed for The Hill about the growing doctor shortage in the U.S., and blasted what he called "the standard, lazy policy fix" for the issue.

"The U.S. is barreling toward a deficit of roughly 187,000 physicians over the next decade," Ghlionn explained. "Nearly half of that gaping hole exists in primary care, the basic, front-line medicine that keeps people out of emergency rooms. A country that leads the world in medical innovation is facing a future where seeing a doctor for a routine checkup could feel like winning the lottery."

He added: "The standard, lazy policy fix for this crisis involves raiding other nations for their medical talent. For decades, American health systems have treated foreign medical schools as an offshore supply chain, pulling doctors out of developing countries to cover the gaps in rural Kansas and inner-city clinics. This is not a wise policy, and it’s certainly not sustainable."

Ghlionn further chastised the practice of "treating the global South as a farm system for American hospitals" as "ethically bankrupt and strategically brain-dead," arguing that the standards at foreign medical schools might not align with those in the U.S. Medical training in the U.S., meanwhile, remains "the absolute global gold standard," and, he argued, must be pushed further.

Ghlionn accused the U.S. of "refusing to build enough seats for [its] own citizens" when it comes to medical training, and highlighted a particular law causing the issue.

"The bottleneck is concerning. It is also entirely artificial, engineered by a 1997 federal policy decision that froze Medicare funding for graduate medical education," he wrote. "The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 capped the number of residency slots the federal government would subsidize, locking the pipeline in place while the American population grew and aged. Thousands of brilliant, highly qualified American college graduates apply to medical school every single year, only to be turned away. They possess the test scores. They have the drive and the ambition, yet they hit a brick wall created by quarter-century-old federal accounting tricks. The U.S. created a system where it rejects its own talent, then acts shocked when it runs out of personnel."

He concluded later: "Elected leaders need to treat the production of American-educated doctors with the exact same urgency historical planners reserved for the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program. Those massive mid-century mobilizations succeeded because policymakers recognized that survival depended on training domestic talent and building national capacity."