Comments about ‘Record number of applicants vying for competitive spots at U.S., University of Utah medical schools’

Change half the law schools in the country to medical schools and it will be a true win win. An abundance of doctors and a shortage of lawyers ...sweet!

University of Utah Medical School has a good program but it doesn't fulfill the needs of the local community. I have seen many, many qualified students turned away because of the small class size, and also because of the U's incredibly strict focus on "diversity." I am not against diversity, but the school should fit the needs of the state and the surrounding states, and immediately increase its class size. They have the facilities, now is the time to act!

Everyone is for diversity, but many highly qualified white males go elsewhere for medical school because Utah will not admit them. Another unspoken fact is that because of personal life style choices women deliver less than 0.7 times as much medical practice as males during their careers. Admission numbers should be adjusted to compensate for this fact.

This is absurd!

Everyone knows we need more doctors. We have qualified applicants. But two years ago they cut the students accepted by 20%?

Why? Because the federal government is simultaneously "fixing" all sorts of problems. It is cutting Medicare and Medicaid by cutting reimbursement for doctors and cutting the number of replacement physicians and the size of training program. Meanwhile, it is spending millions on advertising to get more patients signed up for CHIPS and other Medicare and Medicaid programs, and allowing illegals to be treated using M&M funds. And, the feds demand that medical school faculty spend time treating primary care patients, instead of adding students to the programs. This is destroying our medical providers!

The best thing to do would be to get Congress and the hordes of bureaucrats out of our medical system entirely.

I would pray that the folks who have worked miracles at BYU Idaho get a chance to tackle the medical training system and change it however they see fit. I rather see a doctor trained under their scheme than one dictated by bureaucrats in Washington.

One cannot praise enough the current and future doctors. They deserve more pay!

The excessive "cost" of educating Doctors at the University of Utah is directly related to their desire to fund "research". Those training students should be in the office seeing patients and keeping their skills honed. As a physician who trained in Texas I can tell you all of my instructors spent time in clinics and in doing research. The "U" has a different agenda. Their desire is to turn out research not physicians.
It is true that female physicians spend less time working on a weekly basis providing actual contact and care for patients, but I doubt setting a limit on women entering medical school is appropriate.
Since the "U" serves the training for 4 surrounding states, it seems completely probable that they could secure funding for several student slots from those 4 states and then up the number that the state of Utah supports. The administration needs to change their focus.

I know doctors are going to be spending the first decade of their practices paying their loans back, but they'll still be making six figures. Why do Utah and the federal government not see this as a great way to raise more tax money & invest more in their medical schools? This would also dramatically improve the health situation in the country, especially in rural and other underserved areas.

The U of U sacrifices quality for diversity. How is this a good thing? I look for quality in a physician not diversity.

The UofU is a fantastic medical school, but their admissions needs to to be reexamined & revamped.

As a Utah resident applying to medical school several years back I was excited to apply to my local medical school (UofU). It would be close to home, cheaper (despite recent tuition hikes), and is a decent school. Of course I cast a wide net applying to many schools to bolster my chances of being accepted.

To my delight, I was accepted to 8 medical schools ... all in New England/East Coast, all ranked much higher than Utah and ..... was rejected (not even wait listed) from the U of U med school. It was a well known fact among my BYU classmates that Ohio State (Ohio's public school) accepted more BYU students than the U during my year of application. Clearly the admissions are not representative of our state's population.

Searching for diversity is not a bad thing. Living in NYC I relish learning from everyone around me. However, this creates an awkward tension for those qualified, accepted "diverse" students at the U, because people question their abilities and qualities as a physician & others question - 'did they get in because of "X"?'

I don't think training more doctors is necessarily the answer. I think we need to be training more physician assistants and nurse practitioners to work as physician extenders. These extenders can fulfill many of the roles that physicians have traditionally filled, especially in primary care. It doesn't make sense to see a doctor who makes $300 k /yr when we have a cold or a broken arm. Nurse practitioners and physician assistants cost less to train as well, so the debt load for these students is substantially lower. Those who want to get into medicine and care more about direct patient contact and less about large paychecks or highly technical medicine should consider physician extender careers rather than going to medical school.

This is just another sign that the medical and healthcare professions are broken in this country. Look at the exhorbitant costs associated with medical care and ask yourself this one question: Where is all the money going? Doctors, nurses, hospitals and others will tell you they aren't making it. But SOMEONE is! Solve that problem and the change will be positive on society.

I suspect the insurance companies and drug companies enjoy huge profits, but if you've ever had something simple like a colonoscopy they charge thousands of dollars---no wonder they want everyone to get one! That's just a simple example. Tort reform for medical malpractice is another example. Uncle Sam making your healthcare decisions is yet another. Face it, it's cheaper to die and owe the funeral home a huge bill.

There are not enough spaces available, and some number of those spaces are filled by "diverse" students who are not objectively qualified for the program. A young relative recently graduated from a medical school back East which is considered one of the best, if not the best, in the country. He said that half the class consisted of these "diverse" students, and he wouldn't go to them for treatment, or send anyone he cared about to them.

I'll never understand why the laws of economics don't apply to doctors. As I understand it, the Gov. sets the reimbursement rates for docs and insurance companies set their reimbursement rates on the Gov's rates.

I assume that if the Gov gets out of the reimbursement game that prices will fall. Educate more docs and prices will fall because there will be more docs competing for your dollar. The current system is crazy.

RE: PA ROCK MAN

Thanks for mentioning PA's and NPs. We're very much part of the solution to doctor shortage. And, we may come at a budget price for health care, but don't let that scare anyone away from the profession. Many PAs make six figure salaries these days.

That aside, competition is fierce to get into medical and PA school because health care does not have the resources to train more people. Many programs have room in the classroom for didactic, but not enough clinical sites. It costs hospitals alot of money to train all those doctors, PAs and NPs. It also takes an incredible amount of time to teach while working.

I want my Doctor to be smart and qualified. If that means they are all white or all black, it doesn't matter.

The University of Utah, and everyone else, should admit the best qualified and smartest students REGARDLESS OF RACE!

In other words, it should be FAIR!

With respect to those of you who think that the U is somehow discriminating against white, Mormons, males, you are severely misinformed. The U has 62 spaces for Utah residents with more than 500 students vying for those spots, do the arithmetic. The problem many of these student have is that they are not meeting the specific requirements for the U: patient exposure, shadowing, community service, research, leadership, etc. The U has more emphasis on these areas which is why high GPA/MCAT students get in at other schools and not the U. The U wants student who are not only good students but also have demonstrated over a period of time that they are committed to health care. Unfortunately not everyone can go to the U, but I can tell you that based upon my experience they have the most transparent admissions process in the USA. Cheers!