I was talking to the medical students who volunteer at a clinic that provides free medical care for uninsured people in Newark.
I asked, "Will Obamacare make this clinic unnecessary?"
It was a pregnant question. What do I hope is the answer?
Yes? It would be the goal of the ACA to make such a clinic for the uninsured unnecessary. I hope the ACA will make the concept of "Uninsured Patients" a thing of the past, and yet I doubted that the idea of a free clinic would ever go out of style.
If the ACA succeeds in providing insurance to the uninsured, will there be no uninsured people for medical students to volunteer to help?
The clinic will become unnecessary. Medical students will not volunteer.
Is that good?
When I was in medical school there was a Public Health study that included our class. We were required to attend lectures about physicians who volunteered. It was interesting, although a thief of our limited time. Every five years our entire class recieves a letter asking how much time we volunteer.
The purpose of the study was to see if exposing medical students to physicians who volunteered would cause more of us to volunteer once we were physicians.
The medical school also had this free clinic that students would volunteer to go to. The students could get credit for taking a break from studying and actually committing the act of providing medical care. AND, they were helping the uninsured. (A population that was vast and unending at that time.)
I committed time to the idea that medical students who volunteered might be more likely to continue to volunteer when they finished medical school. I helped draft a program that exists today for medical students to work for the community. We named it S.H.A.R.E.:
http://njms.rutgers.edu/...
The idea was that if you established the habit in medical school, maybe you'd be more likely to do it throughout your career. It was another effort beyond the Public Health study that sends me the letter every five years.
I still go and volunteer to supervise the students at the clinic, and when I asked if the ACA would make the clinic obsolete, it wasn't merely a question about the uninsured patients.
It was a question about what would be available to future medical students to allow them to practice at donating their time and newly learned skills to help others. I'm assuming that this experience does lead to more volunteering in the future.
So, I wondered, "If the ACA makes the clinic unnecessary, will that reduce the opportunities for medical students to practice at volunteering?"
And will that make them less likely to volunteer when they become physicians? Or maybe, everything will change, and the S.H.A.R.E. program will continue without a clinic.
I just always felt that the most potent experience that would predispose towards volunteerism was for medical students to actually provide medical care.