Your AI minute: A Modest Tariff: Why We Must Tax Foreign Doctors to Make American Medicine Great Again
Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA
President and CEO, Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, another lousy golfer, terrible cook
In case you are the only person in world who has not read something about tariffs, here are the Cliff's Notes:
What is a tariff, and who pays it?
A tariff is essentially a government surcharge on products imported from other countries.
Tariffs are paid by the companies that import the goods. The revenue from U.S. tariffs is paid by U.S. importers to the U.S. Treasury Department.
How does that work?
Here’s an example: If Walmart imports $100 in shoes from Vietnam — which face a 20 percent tariff under the terms of a preliminary trade deal — Walmart will owe $20 in tariffs to the U.S. government.
What happens next?
Walmart could try to force the cost onto the Vietnamese shoe manufacturer by telling it that Walmart would pay less for the product.
Walmart could cut into its own profit margin and absorb the cost of the tariff.
Walmart could raise the price of the shoes at its stores.
Some combination of the above.
We've seen this movie before. Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, U.S. legislation (June 17, 1930) that raised import duties to protect American businesses and farmers, adding considerable strain to the international economic climate of the Great Depression.
How do Trump's tariffs compare to the Smoot Hawley Act? | Fortune
Firms around the world are struggling to adjust their supply chains and operations to the chaotic trade war unleashed by the Trump administration. Some firms have developed a dynamic stress-testing system to assist them. It uses a combination of AI and human experts to spot vulnerabilities in the supply chain, create possible scenarios, and find potential remedies. This approach involves four steps: mapping the supply chain, collecting intelligence, developing scenarios, and creating a mitigation plan.
"A Modest Tariff: Why We Must Tax Foreign Doctors to Make American Medicine Great Again"
In a bold move to address the impending physician shortage gripping the United States, policymakers have proposed an elegant, uniquely American solution: slapping a tariff on foreign doctors. That’s right—if we can’t grow enough homegrown healers, we’ll simply make the imported ones more expensive.
After all, nothing screams "free market healthcare" like artificially inflating the cost of competent labor to incentivize the domestic manufacturing of "American-made" MDs.
The Crisis
The Association of American Medical Colleges predicts a shortage of up to 124,000 physicians by 2034. But don’t worry, lawmakers have a plan. No, it doesn't involve increasing medical school slots, fixing student debt, reducing burnout, or making residency applications less of a psychological war zone. That would require structural reform, vision, and a touch of empathy—things Washington hasn't stocked in years.
Instead, the Foreign Doctor Tariff Act (FDTA) proposes a 35% tariff on all services rendered by internationally-trained physicians. Need a cardiac surgeon from Mumbai? That’ll be an extra $18,000—because what better way to protect American jobs than making it prohibitively expensive to survive your own heart attack?
Made in America, Bled in America
Supporters of the tariff argue it will finally "level the stethoscope" and incentivize investment in American med-student factories. Think Ford assembly lines, but for stressed 24-year-olds memorizing the Krebs cycle under flickering fluorescent lights. “We need to bring doctor production back onshore,” said Sen. Rick Misdiagnosis (R-Delirium). “For too long, we’ve outsourced our healthcare to people with unpronounceable names and better test scores.”
His bipartisan colleagues nodded in solemn agreement, pausing only to check their heart rate on their smartwatches, all made in China.
Incentivizing the Dream
The tariff, they argue, will generate billions in revenue, which could be used to… well, nobody's sure yet. Perhaps it will fund American medical education. Or perhaps it’ll just disappear into the same abyss where the Medicare trust fund is headed. Or the costs will be passed on to patients just like they are now.
Critics—also known as people with working frontal lobes—have pointed out that 30% of U.S. doctors are already foreign-trained, many practicing in underserved areas American grads wouldn't touch with a sterile ten-foot pole. “This is like burning down your house because you don’t like the wallpaper,” said one ER physician from Nigeria currently holding the entire rural Midwest together with duct tape and caffeine.
The Future of American Medicine™
But let’s be optimistic. With fewer foreign doctors and a punitive tariff in place, the market will finally correct. Hospitals will have no choice but to set up their own med schools in break rooms. Corporations will begin 3D-printing residents. AI will diagnose everything as anxiety. And American children, finally seeing opportunity in the physician pipeline, will put down their YouTube stardom dreams and pick up anatomy textbooks.
Eventually, an American-born, debt-laden, emotionally shattered yet patriotic MD will walk into your exam room, pause, and ask: “Have you been out of the country in the past 14 days?” And thanks to the tariff, the answer will always be yes—because now, the only place you can afford treatment is somewhere else.
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Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack