Global Health Corps Proposed to Fight AIDS (washingtonpost.com)
Global Health Corps Proposed to Fight AIDS (washingtonpost.com)
The proposed Global Health Service (GHS) would be an overseas cousin of
the domestic one that sends medical workers to isolated or underserved
parts of the country, according to Fitzhugh Mullan, a former U.S.
Public Health Service physician who chaired the panel.
My wife was part of the domestic version of this (National Health Service Corps) early in her career, and I was not impressed with the way it worked. They paid your way through medical school in exchange for a year-for-year service. Along the way, they drastically cut back the number of places where one could serve. We’d moved to Texas in part so that she could commute to an underserved area, but that disappeared. Over the last year of her residency we accumulated a file more than an inch thick of correspondence with them trying to find a place for her to serve. At one point I decided that if we could just agree on one fact, that that would be a step forward. So I tried to get them to agree on the distance between Austin & San Antonio. Being an academic, I cited sources and sent xerox copies of documentation (this was during the immediate pre-internet days), but to no avail.
Finally, we found that there was an opening in a Federal prison reasonably near Austin. More importantly, there was another Federal agency that would intervene on our behalf. We drove up to Dallas to meet with someone from the Bureau of Prisons who was quite helpful, but suggested that it would really help if my wife let the NHSC believe she didn’t want to serve in a prison. Then they could force her to do so, and everyone would be happy (this is a tactic that has been used before). In fact, serving in the prision was exactly the kind of medicine she wanted to practice and, other than the long commute, she really enjoyed her time working there.
But the experience would make me very cautious about how the current crowd would administer something like this. It seems to me that people who philosophically think government doesn’t work well do a darned could job of fulfilling that belief.