FIRST ON FOX: Three internal medicine residency programs are being accused of favoring foreign-trained doctors over American-trained doctors, with more than 90% of the most recent cohort of residents across the three programs coming from overseas, according to a civil rights complaint.
Medical watchdog Do No Harm filed a complaint Tuesday with the Department of Health and Human Services against healthcare providers Corewell Health, Texas Tech University and HCA Healthcare, raising concerns over the demographics of their internal medicine residency programs.
The complaint alleges that the three residency programs are discriminating against American-trained doctors and violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Affordable Care Act.
"National origin discrimination is both unlawful and inconsistent with the broader American commitment to equal treatment," Do No Harm's Chief Medical Officer Kurt Miceli, MD said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "When residency programs favor foreign-trained physicians over American-trained doctors, they effectively prevent qualified Americans from accessing valuable, competitive, and prestigious learning opportunities."
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The complaint revealed that at the internal medicine program at Corewell Health in Dearborn, Michigan, just one of the 33 residents attended an American medical school. In fact, 84% of those residents earned their medical degrees in just a handful of countries abroad: nine trained in Sudan, eight in Pakistan, and four in Jordan, with others coming from places such as Palestine, Bahrain, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The current director of the program attended medical school in Lebanon.
At Texas Tech University, 95% of the 39 internal medicine residents were also trained at foreign medical schools. Similar to Corewell, these doctors hail from a concentrated set of countries in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Eight trained in Pakistan, five from Bangladesh, two each from Egypt, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, and others from Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Syria. Both directors of the residency program attended medical school in Iraq, according to Do No Harm.
The internal medicine program at HCA Healthcare’s Brandon Hospital in Tampa does not have a single doctor who graduated from an American school in its most recent cohort, the complaint stated. Of its 58 total residents, 70% graduated from foreign medical schools, with a majority of them from the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The HCA Brandon program is led by Mohammad Said Saad, who completed his medical education in Egypt, and Syed Zaidi, who trained in Pakistan, Do No Harm said.
"Indeed, these programs reveal a consistent pattern," the complaint read. "Each has excluded practically all American-trained physicians from their residencies. Each has filled their cohorts almost exclusively with residents trained in a small set of foreign countries. And each is headed-up by directors that mirror the residents they choose: foreign-trained physicians educated in the small set of foreign countries from which these residencies fill their ranks."
The complaint also calls on HHS to refer the matter to the Justice Department.
"It is deeply concerning that these programs appear to be discriminating against graduates of U.S. medical schools," Miceli said. "Medical institutions and their directors should be hiring residents based on their ability to deliver high quality patient care, not on national origin."
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Manhattan Institute senior fellow Ilya Shapiro suggested that in addition to being in violation of civil rights law, the medical programs could likely be in violation of immigration law.
"That kind of disproportionate hiring pattern definitely raises an inference that the programs are violating the law, so HHS should indeed investigate," Shapiro said. "In addition to the civil rights laws, there may be a violation of immigration law as well, because visas can only be granted if no qualified American can be found for the job or, in the medical context, to serve areas with a lack of doctors (not the case for internal-medicine residencies)."
Cato Institute senior legal fellow Dan Greenberg agreed that the high number of foreign doctors in the programs appears "unusual" but said its possible it could be "explained without resorting to national-origin discrimination."
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He suggested two possible "innocent explanation[s]" for why these medical residency programs predominantly consist of foreign-born doctors.
"It is possible that the set of applicants from other countries to these particular programs are generally more qualified than the set of applicants from the USA. That is, perhaps the set of foreign-born applicants generally had higher board scores, more positive recommendations, or superior clinical experience before residency acceptances/rejections were made," Greenberg said.
He also suggested that non-US students might also have a "disproportionate interest" in internal medicine.
"The big question is if the complainants can show that comparable/roughly equal applicants were passed over in favor of foreign-born applicants, but just to figure out whether that is true — and what a comparable or roughly equal native-born applicant would look like — will require a fair amount of research into how each applicant is measured," Greenberg said.
Fox News Digital reached out to Corewell Health, Texas Tech University and HCA Healthcare for comment.
