Howard Dean: Right On Foreign Medical Students

Justin Elliott has a kind of exposé piece in Salon about Howard Dean’s post-DNC work as a de facto lobbyist and PR man for McKenna Long & Aldridge. Elliott’s interest in the topic stems, I believe, from Dean’s advocacy on behalf of the Iranian cult/terrorist group MEK which is certainly repugnant. But as Elliott details, Dean does a lot of work much of it related to health care. And—I would hasten to add—not all of it on the wrong side. After all, the nature of politics is that most issues have evil lobbyists working on both sides of them and usually someone is right.

Consider this:

Whom else does Dean work for as a paid advocate?

In January, he waded into another high-stakes healthcare fight, this one being waged in New York state between foreign medical schools and their American competitors. The issue was whether foreign-trained doctors would have access to hospitals in New York for their residencies. Dean wrote an Op-Ed in the Albany Times-Union, “N.Y. needs its foreign-trained doctors,” that repeated talking points of foreign medical schools, which, Dean’s bio blurb noted, are clients of McKenna Long & Aldridge.

I hesitate to be accused of repeating the talking points of foreign medical schools, but the United States of America spends a lot of money on health care services each year. There are various reasons for that, but one reason is that our doctors earn the highest wages in the world. And yet, one doesn’t need to be born in the United States of America to be a competent medical professional. The most natural thing in the world is for people born in other countries to try to obtain the training they need to work as doctors in the USA and then come here. In a sane world, we would be actively encouraging this by issuing clear training standards and making sure that every bright high school student in the developing world knows exactly what he or she has to do to someday come to America and work as a doctor. Restrictions on foreign doctors’ entry to the American market is a massive redistribution of wealth away from working class Americans and to rich highly educated professionals and the rich highly educated professionals who train them.