1120 



absorbed inte its permanent medical structure almost one-third of the medical 

 graduates of that year from Greece. There are more American-trained Iranian 

 doctors in New York than in all of Iran. Korea, where more than one-half of all 

 sections of the country have not a single doctor with modern medical training, 

 provides 20 anesthesiologists for the staff of one east coast American hospital 

 alone. Filipinos, Turks, Indians — all less healthy than we — must delay advances 

 in their own health standards because we use their resources." ^^ 



2. Rosemary Stevens and Joan Vermeulen, Yale University Medical School: 

 "In the decade ending June 1971, almost 29,000 physicians entered the United 



States under immigrant visas, and the number of immigrants admitted in fiscal 

 1971 alone — 5,756 physicians — was equivalent to the output of graduates from 

 60 American medical schools." "' 



3. George B. Baldwin, Economic Adviser on Projects of the World Bank: 



"We produced 9,862 doctors in 1956 ; eleven years later the figure had increased 

 by less than 10 percent. Today approximately one out of three new doctors enter- 

 ing practice in the United States is an immigrant trained abroad." ^^ 



4. Dr. Irene Butter, School of Public Health, University of Michigan: 



"A permanent loss of doctors from the poorest to the richest nations is the 

 most disturbing aspect of the medical brain drain. Generally the impression has 

 been conveyed that about four out of every five FMGs in the U.S. eventually 

 return to their native countries. This impression is not confirmed by the data . . . 

 [presented in this article]. Though these data refer to two distinct groups rather 

 than to one population, they indicate that in the two-year period at least four 

 FMGs entered for each departing doctor, and that among departing doctors there 

 is a tendency to return." ^*" 



5. Dr. G. Halsey Hunt, Executive Director, Educational Council for FMGs: 



"It is a depressing and humbling experience for an American doctor to visit 

 a medical school in one of the unindustrialized countries of Asia, to have his host 

 open the conversation with a bland statement. 'You people in the United States 

 and your hospitals couldn't get along without our doctors' — and to realize at the 

 present time this is a fact. If the 11,000 foreign graduates who are now occupy- 

 ing internships and residencies in the United States hospitals were to be suddenly 

 withdrawn, many U.S. hospitals would be forced to curtail sharply their services 

 to patients. I submit that for the long run this is a completely untenable 

 situation. By almost any standard of measurement, the United States is the 

 richest country in the world. American standards of medical education, medical 

 research, and hospital practice are among the highest in the world. It ill 

 becomes us to depend indefinitely on other countries for the production of medi- 

 cal manpower to provide services to American patients." ^ 



Thus the problem exists, and its gravity has been acknowledged by 

 officials in the Federal Government, by Members of the Congress, and 

 by the Nation's leading medical and health authorities. To reduce its 

 complexities to the simplest form, general illustrative statistics and 

 evaluative data are presented below, mainly from the Stevens- 

 Vermeulen study and the AMA's compilation on FMGs. 



ESSENTIAL DATA FROM AMa's 1971 REPORT ON FMg's 



According to the AMA study, FMGs have played an "important 

 role" in the demand/supply aspect of this Nation's medical services. 



^»8 Gregory Henderson, "Foreign Students: Exchange or Immigrationt" In, U.S. ConCTess. 

 House, Committee on Education and Labor, International Education: Past, Present, Prob- 

 lems and Prospects. Selected Readings to Supplement H.R. 14643, prepared by the Task 

 Force on International Education, 89th Cong., 2d sess., 1966, pp. 350-351. (House Doc. 

 No. 527). (Hereafter cited as, Selected Readings on International Education, House Com- 

 mittee on Education and Labor, 1966.) 



1*^ Stevens and Vermeulen, op. clt., p. 64. 



«^ Baldwin, op. cit., p. 370. 



i»» Irene Butter, "The Migratory Flow of Doctors to and from the United States," Jfed- 

 icaJ Core, 9 (January-February 1971), p. 23. 



*» Department of ^tate, Proceedings of Workshop on the International Migration of 

 Talent and Skills, < 'ler 1966, pp. 126-127. 



