Immigration and the physician shortage: A 'win-win,' says Tom Price, M.D.

Medical Economics sat down with Tom Price, M.D., former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and a practicing orthopedic surgeon, to discuss how legal, employment-based immigration could help address the nation's growing health care workforce shortage.

Price outlines the scope of the problem — and how U.S. immigration policy may be blocking part of the solution.

"There are about 15 million million health care workers in the country. About 20% of those are non-U.S. born folks," Price said. "They're immigrants who've come here either as kids or later in life. Many of them have had their education or their training here and they fall in love with the United States and they want to stay.

"In addition to that, there are about 1.5 million foreign students in the United States studying some sort of health care," he continued. "And what we do in the United States, sadly, is [once] they finish their training, they finish their education, and then we tell them to go home."

He emphasized that reform would be a "win-win, both from an immigration standpoint, and from a health care workforce standpoint."