Public Medical School: Government V.S. Doctors

By Jimin Moon

The spread of COVID-19 has revealed the fact that an increase in the overall labor force and specifically, an increase in medical services for disease prevention is severely needed. Aiming to ramp up medical services, the government plans to open several public medical schools and expand the medical school admission quotas starting in 2022. 300-400 medical students will be added to the original annual number for at least the next 10 years. Due to this plan, both the KMA(Korean medical association) as well as the ruling political party are experiencing severe conflict.

The current number of doctors per 1,000 people in Korea is 2.3. This is far behind the OECD average of 3.4. The government believes that this is a problem that must be remedied. The Ministry of Health and Welfare estimates that Korea needs about 60,000 more doctors to catch up with the OECD average.

In addition to increasing the overall number of doctors, the ruling party is planning to require that 3,000 of the additional 4,000 students practice in fields handling severe disease, and the rest of them will be made to specialize in areas like epidemiology, biomedical medicine, and general medical science. The reasoning behind these measures is that in the future the overall medical services in South Korea will be enhanced overall and also ready to deal with any future pandemics.

The government also require these additional doctors to work in rural areas for up to 10 years. This is quite a long time. Although rural areas do need doctors, rural areas do not have hospitals to employ those doctors, and many rural citizen prefer going to big city hospitals even when they do have local facilities. And the doctors being forced to work in those rural areas aren’t being appropriately compensated for their time and effort. Living and working in rural areas is very difficult, and the government isn’t offering any incentive in exchange. Opposing doctors have suggested that the chance of doctors who have completed training in public medical schools located in rural areas moving to bigger cities and changing their subjects into one where they can earn more money is very high.

On the other hand, the KMA(Korean Medical Association), KIRA(Korea Intern Resident Association), and medical students are strongly opposed to the government’s opinions. First of all, they argue that Korea has the best health care access among the OECD countries and the doctor-to-patient ratio will surpass the OECD average by 2028. Also, doctors claim that the fundamental problems are low medical fees and required medical insurance premiums. In serious situations like COVID-19, it requires lots of doctors in risky subjects such as infection internal medicine, cardiothoracic surgery, etc. However, doctors in those areas do not get enough pay for taking risks. They claim that the solution is not to increase the number of doctors working in those fields, but instead to increase the medical fees and medical insurance premiums at the expense of the patients. Furthermore, building public medical schools and training medical students for free for 10 years would potentially be funded through taxes.

In this author’s opinion, supporting the government’s current plan comes at too high a cost and sacrifices too many people. To conclude, the construction of public medical schools is not a fundamental solution to the problems of medical service. Currently, all the doctors and medical students who were participating in a protest of this plan have returned to their original position due to the government’s executive order to do so after the agreement to re-discuss from the beginning between the ruling democratic party and the KMA. However, the KIRA is still opposing the government's plan and medical students are planning to continue to boycott the national medical licensing exam. This is a serious conflict that must be addressed. Medical care is a professional service that all citizens deserve as a basic human right. The government and the doctors should stop blaming each other and should continue discussions and negotiations, while respecting each other’s opinions, setting aside greed and ulterior motives, and looking toward the best medical care for our citizens.

References:

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20200904000132&ACE_SEARCH=1

https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20200723003151315

http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20200811000941&ACE_SEARCH=1