Trump’s newest attack on rural hospitals

The Trump GOP’s Medicaid cuts will cause many rural hospitals to close. Now, Trump has come up with a way to hasten that process.

“NBC News medical analyst Dr. Vin Gupta warned of the consequences that President Donald Trump’s imposed $100,000 annual visa fee for highly skilled foreign workers could have on those seeking health care in the U.S., especially those living in Republican states. 

 

“This is going to have significant impacts, not just in the short term, but very much in the medium term here and that’s the irony of a lot of these policies, they’ll impact red states, and it’s not going to be felt immediately,” Gupta said in a Friday interview with MeidasTouch.”

In addition to four years in medical school, American med school grads need at least one year of internship/residency to legally practice. For most graduates, the crushing burden of student loans, particularly if they also took out college loans, means they need to train in a highly compensated specialty. For this reason, primary care practices—family medicine, general internal medicine, general pediatrics, geriatrics, obstetrics and gynecology (OB-GYN), and combined internal medicine/pediatrics—are increasingly staffed by foreign medical school graduates, who arrive in America with H-1B visas and less debt. Raising the fees nearly 100-fold will be prohibitively expensive for community hospitals where many of these foreign grads have landed.

“Gupta mentioned that the “irony” is that the policy is “probably going to impact red states more than blue states,” saying that in red states, there are more community hospitals, rural hospitals and “frankly, more places where American medical grads tend not to gravitate towards.”

 

“Gupta went on to say foreign medical graduates will likely pursue training and careers in countries where “they’ll get paid,” “be more welcome,” and “their path will be a lot easier.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doctor-vin-gupta-trump-h1b-immigration-hospital_n_68ced92ce4b066d79ee4060b?origin=home-latest-news-unit

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