A peek at TCT headliner? Keynote takes on GME funding
Could this be a preview of a keynote speech at the upcoming Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) conference in Washington, D.C.? In an assay, economist Uwe E. Reinhardt, PhD, argued that graduate medical education (GME) did not meet the standards for receiving federal funding.
Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton University and a regular contributor to the New York Times, will discuss the future of healthcare in the U.S. and globally in a presentation scheduled for 9:45 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 13, in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
On Aug. 22 in the newspapers’ Upshot section, he penned an editorial that explored, from an economist’s perspective, the validity of public funding for GME. It is a topic that has been on the minds of academic and teaching hospitals, cash-strapped policy makers and the Institute of Medicine.
GME doesn’t make the grade for being a public good, which is a resource that is not diminished by the use of others and is available to all, he reasoned.
“Medical education and training represents human capital that is fully owned by the trainees,” Reinhardt wrote. Physicians can use their training as they like, for patient care, working on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley or elsewhere. “In principle, therefore, the owners of that valuable, purely private human capital should pay themselves for its production.”
He acknowledged that pulling the plug on $15 billion distributed to teaching hospitals would be drastic. He used the opportunity to remind teaching hospitals to make a case for themselves if they wanted to continue to receive federal funding.
TCT.14 will run from Sept. 13 to 17.