BOISE, Idaho ― For-profit medical schools are starting to pop up around the country, promising to create new family doctors for underserved rural regions.
Rural states like Idaho need more general practitioners, with the baby boom generation aging and expanded insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act making health care more accessible. But critics of the new schools question whether companies can properly train the nation’s next crop of doctors.
“On face value, it looks like a pretty good deal” because for-profit schools promise to bring benefits without relying on taxpayer dollars, said Dr. Ted Epperly, who runs a family practice residency program in Boise, where a new for-profit school plans to start accepting students in 2018. “But it’s a little bit like Wal-Mart moving into a small community with mom-and-pop shops ― it damages the existing workforce producers.”
Proponents contend challenges the new schools face are surmountable, and any stigma about for-profit medical training is born of fear, not fact. Dr. Robert Hasty, dean of the newly created Idaho College of Osteopathic Medicine, notes for-profit hospitals also were once stigmatized but now make up about a quarter of all U.S. hospitals.
“We have such a need for doctors, and if we have to make this investment, it’s worthwhile,” Hasty said.
Thirty-one new medical schools opened in the country between 2002 and 2014, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Most were nonprofit or public.
For decades, for-profit medical schools were relegated to foreign shores, with U.S.-based companies launching medical schools in the Caribbean. But that changed in 2007 when Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine opened in Parker, Colorado.
