A group of medical students from the University of Washington experienced a real eye-opener this summer as they took a first-hand glimpse of our nation’s health care system. Apparently, the students did some job shadowing over the summer and learned many of the things that they don’t teach you in medical school – such as the frustration a physician experiences when trying to find a prescription for a patient that will take care of his or her ailments while also being included in Wal-Mart’s list of $4 prescriptions.

Matching prescriptions to patient budgets wasn’t the only ugly reality that medical students had to face during their summer of exploration. Other realties they encountered was the need for doctors to prescribe unnecessary tests in order to keep themselves protected from lawsuits while also ordering treatments for patients based upon their ability to pay. Similarly, they learned first hand how chronic yet often preventable illnesses such as diabetes, obesity and hypertension are filling up doctors’ schedules around the country.

“I often wondered what we were actually doing to help people,” commented Jens N. Olsgaard, who worked at a community health center in Butte, Montana over the summer, in an interview with Florida’s The Gainesville Sun.

After their summer experiences, many of the students who participated in the program walked away with the feeling that our health care system is in need of major assistance.

“You have to reimburse for primary care,” said 24-year-od Amanda I. Messinger, who worked with a family practitioner in Kodiak, Alaska as part of the program. “You have to reimburse doctors for spending the time to catch things early, to manage chronic things, to be able to offer people treatments they can afford early instead of waiting until there’s a catastrophic surgery. It’s pretty simple.”

This summer isn’t the first summer that University of Washington students have participated in this type of program. In fact, the school has been sending students out to underserved areas and rural areas to serve in primary care facilities for 21 years so far. This year, however, a whopping 117 of 216 second-year students participated in the program – the largest number to participate so far.

In all, the school has a cooperative agreement with four states, all of which do not have their own medical colleges. These states include Idaho, Alaska, Montana and Wyoming. This year, the experience was even more meaningful considering the major changes that President Obama is striving to make within the health care industry.

The students didn’t just see a need for health care reform in order to provide better care to patients. Rather, they also found that the payment policies currently in place have left many primary care providers struggling to pay for expenses. As a result, many are forced into early retirement or they are left with no other choice but to work long hours and to overload their schedules with patients. Thanks to the unsatisfactory hours and income that many primary care physicians are facing, only about one-third of medical school students actually train in family medicine or internal medicine. Just 25 years ago, approximately half of medical students when in this direction.

“I don’t think you can practice optimal medicine,” said 23-year-old Jacob R. Opfer, who is one of the students who participated in the program, in the newspaper article. “There is too little incentive after going through all this education and being in school for the majority of your life to want to pursue a career just in primary care.”

Although the experience opened the eyes of many students, others became even more motivated to pursue a career as a primary care physician.

“This just sold it to me,” commented 24-year-old Kylie G. Boggess. “You got to have a very personal relationship with your patients. You get to know them.”

Still, Boggess went on to say, “I would really like to practice in a world where I can just take care of my patients and that that’s the end of it. Where the big elephant in the room is not whether or not my recommendations mean anything because of cost.”