March 15, 2019 Friday
Bedtime story
Gradual Change in Residency Application System
It is only in the United States that the
health care is shamelessly, blatantly and unapologetically privatized
comprehensively to the hilt and Americans are proud of it.
Even the famous Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act that is popularly known by its nickname Obamacare (because it was
signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010 just three months before I
would say goodbye to the great nation) is largely an expansion of insurance
coverage to individuals rather than nationalization of health care.
It would be of course wrong to say that the
United States health care system is totally privatized as the twin programs of Medicare (providing health coverage for
Americans over 65 years of age) and Medicaid (providing health benefit to those
individuals of any age whose income and resources are insufficient to pay for
their health care) would affirm.
In 2017 the spending on Medicare (which is
totally a Federal sponsored program in contrast to Medicaid which is a joint
federal-state program) in the context of the US economy as a whole was 3.7% of
GDP.
This is an astonishingly large investment
by a system on its people that is largely assumed to be immorally and selfishly
privatized one.
As we saw one night back that by 1950s
students passing out from medical schools had increased sufficiently to beat
the number of residency programs so that now the pressure was on them to make a
quick decision.
After the end of the World War II there was
no more scope of getting residency allotted before completion of graduation as
the colleges had collectively stopped releasing the transcripts of students or
issuing the letters of recommendations to the hospitals with residency programs
before a certain date.
Moreover, after 1950 the hospitals would
call the applicants on phone and ask them to make their decision not within
days but in matter of hours sometimes even before hanging up the telephone.
And just as a reminder there were no mobile
phones then and even the “normal” phone calls would have burnt a hole in the
pocket.
By this time the numbers had grown to such
a large extent that it was not humanly possible to carrying out the matching
process.
So it was decided that the process must be
automated.
It so happened that during those days in
1950 the medical schools around the Boston area had already incorporated an
algorithm for the matching of localized residency programs.
A surprising fact if not an astonishing one,
is it not Mon Ami that computers were being used so early in medicine?
The National Interassociation Committee on
Internships or the NICI then decided to apply this Boston algorithm (it was
known as the Boston Pool Plan) for a new centralized system that would cover
all the medical schools and hospitals of all the states of the nation.
Just so that you understand what matching to
a residency program entails let me give you a more detailed view of it.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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