Opinion: Stop treating medical residents like indentured servants
Congress and the public need to hold teaching hospitals accountable for improving wages and working conditions of the medical residents they claim to train.
Hundreds of years ago, poor immigrants were forced to become indentured servants to repay the cost of their passage to the U.S. by performing years of hard labor. This practice lives on for U.S. physicians-in-training, who have no choice but to serve years of indentured servitude to teaching hospitals in order to qualify for a medical license or board certification. We know them as medical residents.
In recent months, the announcement that Hahnemann University Hospital would has cast a pall of uncertainty over the future of hundreds of residents who suddenly did not know how or whether they would complete their training. Instead to the highest bidders, a consortium of regional hospitals, for a sum of $55 million.
