Health and Disability

On January 27 President Trump signed an executive order blocking citizens, including doctors, from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days. This may have a measurable impact on the U.S. health care system. Many doctors may be blocked from returning to the U.S. after leaving the country. According to 2010 data, of approximately 850,000 doctors providing direct patient care in the U.S., 4,180 physicians were Iranian citizens and 3,412 physicians were Syrian citizens.

There are currently 260 people from the seven countries who are applying for residency slots in U.S. hospitals but are now banned from coming to the U.S. Match day, when students learn whether they have been accepted into a program, is on March 17, just over a month away. If the U.S. loses these applicants and cannot find candidates to take their spots, a simple calculation shows that this could affect 400,000 patients over the next year alone (estimated with assumptions that 50% of them successfully match to residency programs, become primary care doctors, and see 3,000 patients over the next year).

In a recent paper published in The BMJ, we found that when Medicare patients were admitted to U.S. hospitals with general medical conditions, their probability of dying within 30 days of admission was 5% lower if they were treated by international medical graduates than if they were treated by U.S. medical graduates. We found no difference in whether patients were more likely to be readmitted to the hospital within 30 days after being discharged. We also saw that the cost of care was somewhat higher with foreign medical graduates than with U.S. medical graduates, though the difference was very small.