Immigration and the physician shortage: Residency bottlenecks and visa limits

Tom Price, M.D., sheds light on a major, yet often overlooked, contributor to the U.S. health care workforce shortage: limits on both immigration pathways and residency training slots.

According to an article published in Staffing Stream, there are tens of thousands of physicians and nurses — who have passed U.S. licensure exams and met immigration requirements — who are stuck.

Why? One key reason is that most graduate medical education (GME) slots are funded by Medicare, and Congress has long caped how many new physicians can enter residency training each year.

"In an effort to limit the exposure of a liability to Medicare, the number of residency slots are limited in this country," Price explained.

The second barrier, he noted, stems from the immigration system itself, which caps the number of health care professionals allowed in through merit-based or workforce-need pathways.

But, according to Price, there is a solution.

"We could solve this relatively quickly from an immigration standpoint by moving toward a merit-based visa system," he said. "[It] would then help significantly decrease the workforce challenges that we have, and also make it so that those individuals that are allowed into this country are folks that have a talent or an expertise in a profession that is drastically needed in the United States for our own citizens."