Scott Klug: “Mr. Chairman, what we are going to talk about for the next few minutes is the subject of military physicians. In 1972…”

“Mr. Chairman, what we are going to talk about for the next few minutes is the subject of military physicians. In 1972, in order to guarantee there were enough physicians in the military, we took two steps in Congress. One was to set up a scholarship program to send medical students to places like the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and to Harvard, and to Virginia, and to Stanford, and Chicago, and Nebraska, and any university you might want to pick out. At the same time, we established in Bethesda, MD, the Department of defense's very own medical school. Now, that was 1972. Just 3 years later, in 1975, the Defense Manpower Commission reported that, quote, it was an unjustifiably costly method to meet current and future procurement and retention goals for military professional and medical personnel. Three years after the medical school in Bethesda was started, it cost $200,000 for each graduate, and the scholarship program cost each student just $34,000. Now keep in mind today as we kind of run through this list of how expensive this school is that today the school in Bethesda only provides about 11 percent of the doctors in the United States armed services.”