of the answers – and they’re all in the MGT studies that were provided to you to
study for this meeting.”
I continued: “There is in the state of Florida a great health care crisis in the
rural counties, in the big cities with the urban poor, in the areas where all the
elderly from all the big cities up north are coming to settle and retire. Many people
are going to need doctors in the next 20 years – and where are they coming
from? Not all of them can come from Gainesville or Miami or Tampa. So where
can they come from? That’s what I have to ask you. The need is going to be so
great that it cannot be met by just one new medical school. We’re going to have
to have several new medical schools. There are many talented students in the
state who want to be physicians and have been denied that opportunity by people
like you who think that there should be only a handful of medical schools.
So pull that Blue Key out of whatever orifice that you have it stuck in and try to
think about the needs of the whole state.”
For those of you who don’t know, the Blue Key Society is for those from
UF who are lucky enough to belong. Regent X is one of them. He’s a Blue Key
holder and very loyal to the place where he graduated from. But he was a regent,
and he owed his loyalty to the state of Florida. The legislators felt the same way.
They knew that the regents were appointed by the governor to represent the educational
needs of the entire state, and at that very moment the legislators were
thinking of disbanding the Board of Regents.
In fact, they did indeed disband the board in July 2001 for this very reason
and created the Board of Governors to oversee higher education. This was the
reason for it right here: The regents did not consider the data right in front of
them that showed Florida was facing a great health care crisis. We still don’t
have all the doctors we need, even at this moment with three new schools, do
we? We’re getting there, though. We’re graduating about 120 doctors every year
here at Florida State, and the other new medical schools are graduating doctors
as well.
The national data at that time was saying, incorrectly, that there were too
many doctors in the United States. But the national data also was saying, correctly,
that there was a great growth of older citizens, and a great migration of
citizens from the North to the South. There were not enough doctors to take care
of this population redistribution, and the state government needed to be looking
at this scenario to prevent a health care crisis in years to come. Thankfully,
our Legislature took steps in the 1990s and early 2000s to help us prevent a real
health care crisis. Otherwise, things right now would be really horrible. •
Breaking the Mold | 25