New Medical Schools for 2016?

[Med Ed]

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Most every MD I work with (and it's not like 4-5, it's more like 30+) all say the same thing, and that is that if you are going to go DO then you should go to RVU. A lot of students precept at my hospital from most of the western DO schools and the docs say the RVU students consistently outperform the others in knowledge and preparedness. Their match lists show that PDs don't give a rats about their tax status or their founder. They also require their students to take the USMLE and this last year they had a higher USMLE average than U CO, which, for a DO school is rather impressive even if it only happened once. Remember that all I am saying is that it has become a fairly well respected DO school.

You are fixated on the tree and missing the forest, which is where the real debate over for-profit medical education exists. Eight years ago, George Mychaskiw, II, DO, wrote an opinion/response for the JAOA that outlines the broader concerns: Dangers of For-Profit Education: More Than Just Words. It is worth reading.

It is noteworthy to point that even detractors of for-profit schools, like myself, have never made the case that places like RVU or CNU are incapable of meeting accreditation standards, attracting students, enacting their curricula, and ultimately matching their graduates. By most measures RVU may have become a fairly typical DO school. The issue is that businesses have strong incentives to be efficient, and therefore for-profit schools, as a whole, will only invest in their educational programs insofar as they need to. This means doing enough to attract students who are willing to borrow over $80,000 per year to attend. Should the market ever dry up the for-profit schools will simply close their doors and the owners/investors will move on to other ventures.

The apologetics used to justify onshore for-profit medical schools could also be applied to the Caribbean ones, as well. Is it not true that SGU, Ross, AUC, Saba, and many others have, over the years, fed thousands of graduates into US residency programs? Do they not have thousands of alumni practicing medicine around the country? Of course they do. Does that mean we should not care about an insidious, potentially corrosive aspect of their operational model getting even a tiny foothold here?

To some extent a parallel debate has gone on in the hospital world ever since the Frist/Frist/Massey trio opened the first for-profit hospital in Tennessee through HCA (Hospital Corporation of America). While it's over a decade old, this Health Affairs article contrasts for-profit, nonprofit, and government hospitals.

Excerpt:
Medical service offerings vary markedly by ownership, likely because hospital types adopt or prioritize goals differently. Although all hospitals must earn sufficient profits to operate, the evidence here suggests that for-profits are more likely to respond to profitability than the other types are when making supply decisions. Since government hospitals are most likely to supply the unprofitable services that are disproportionately needed by poor and underinsured patients, the evidence also suggests that such hospitals are caregivers of last resort. Nonprofit hospitals are often the intermediate type in terms of balancing profit seeking and serving the poor through service choices.