At that time we were probably number 47th in the opportunity for … kids
to go to medical school in Florida compared to the rest of the states. You could
probably get in Cambridge in England easier than you could get in the University
of Florida medical school.
There wasn’t enough interest in there at that time, and as I became more
aware of the health care problems in Florida, it was obvious that we needed about
1,800 geriatricians to take care of the large number of senior citizens in Florida.
If you trained geriatricians in a graduate program, it would take 50 years to get
1,800 trained, so we looked at other opportunities to serve rural Florida, innercity
Florida, and the growing 3.2 million people over 65 years old in Florida, and
ways to efficiently have the best opportunities of taking care of them….
The opposition was from organized medicine, and the opposition was from
the Board of Regents at that time, … the deans of the medical schools…. Even
some resistance from the other private medical schools that receive funding from
the state, representatives from their area that unbeknownst to me worked for
some of those schools and served in the Legislature. But on the second bill that
passed the Senate and the House, the resistance continued to be the same resistance;
we had some resistance because we would not combine it with FAMU;
we had some resistance because we would not have just a two-year school, and
resistance from hospital systems associated with universities that thought that
they might receive less funding from the school. It was typical; it was the money
deal….
[So how did it pass the second time?]
I think the difference was the education of the Legislature in general…. [T]
alk about a complicated issue that had never been addressed in 25 years…. You
know, there were at that time about three physicians in the House and one in the
Senate. All of those except me didn’t want another medical school. The people
that represented the hospitals in Florida, administrators of hospitals, the majority
leader in the House didn’t want to have a medical school…. [T]here was too
much provincialism about “we want our medical school, there’s no other medical
schools….”
[The MGT study] was 1,000 pages or so…. I think it [still] reflects all the
needs of Florida, even with the changes that occurred in the last eight or 10
years…. As you know, now in the United States they’re looking back and saying,
“In the next ten years we’re going to have to have 200,000 more physicians,”
because [many] of the physicians, even in Florida, are older than I am and they’re
either retiring, subsequently have some disease or out of practice. So whenever
we were looking at those parameters eight or 10 years ago, they’re more profound
now. And as the data’s come out all over the country, I don’t know how we’re
going to train 200,000 physicians for the United States, but I think it’s an ultimate
opportunity for the state of Florida….
Fortunately John Thrasher became speaker at the time after we’d worked on
this issue for about four years. He worked with the Florida Medical Association;
he understood….
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