Visa waiver program lets foreign doctors stay in U.S.

Late last year, Syed Hashmi, a Pakistani doctor who had recently completed his internal medicine residency in Chicago, was facing the unwelcome prospect of having to return to Pakistan. At the same time, Midtown Family Medical Clinic in Cape Girardeau had dimming prospects of finding a physician to help staff its low-income clinic.

A new program offered by a regional government agency offered a singular solution to both problems.

The Delta Regional Authority is a partnership between federal and state governments aimed at guiding economic development in the Mississippi Delta region, which covers 240 counties and parishes from Illinois to Louisiana, including part of Southeast Missouri. The agency recently introduced the Physician Visa Waiver Program, an attempt to improve access to health care and to ease the shortage of physicians in the region.

Foreign medical graduates trained in the United States, like Hashmi, who normally would be required to return to their native land following completion of their training, can obtain a waiver. That waiver allows a graduate to remain in the United States to work as a physician provided he or she agrees to work in a medically underserved area for three years.

In addition, these doctors must provide primary care service 40 hours a week and must treat all categories of patients, including Medicare, Medicaid and indigent patients.

Delta Regional Authority co-chairman Pete Johnson said that bringing the region up to speed by meeting its health-care needs is vital to economic development.

"Health care is a key link for economic prosperity," Johnson said. "Good health care makes good workers, students and a good economy."

Johnson said the region is lagging behind the rest of the country as far as access to physicians, but he expects the program to have a big impact on that.

The impact already is being felt in Cape Girardeau and 15 other places where physicians with waivers have already been placed.

Only if no alternative

In the case of Midtown Family Medical Clinic, it was becoming increasingly hard to hire an American physician, said administrator Fred Kelley. The Delta Regional Authority looked over the situation, deemed that Cape Girardeau County qualified as a health-care shortage area and placed Hashmi in Cape Girardeau.

The strict evaluation a clinic or area has to undergo in order to qualify for the waiver is a major reason the program doesn't threaten American doctors or American jobs, Johnson said.

"They must demonstrate there's no way to get an American doctor."

Kelley and Hashmi both expressed satisfaction with the program.

Hashmi was not looking forward to the prospect of returning to Pakistan as a rural doctor because of a lack of opportunity and poor rural infrastructure to support medicine there. He said that in Pakistan, a community the size of Cape Girardeau would not have as ready access to facilities necessary to run an effective practice.

trehagen@semissourian.com

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