Physician Supply Policies and Health Reform

A LOOK BACKWARD IN A PERIOD like the present when the debate over health care reform becomes ever more insistent, recourse to history may provide some perspective, not so much to chart the way to the future but rather to deter the nation from advancing down unproductive paths. In the decade and a half following World War II there was mounting pressure from the public and the medical education establishment for congressional appropriations to expand the output of physicians on grounds that the existing medical school capacity was insufficient to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding population for access to health care services. By the early 1960s, key policy analysts of the American Medical Association (AMA) recognized that the Association's unremitting opposition to direct federal support for either the enhancement or the expansion of medical education could no longer be sustained. Its public relations efforts were now shifted to