Sen. Bernie Sanders visits Morehouse; urges more spending for historically Black medical schools

To train more Black doctors, the federal government needs to bolster funding and make more training slots available for historically Black medical schools, leaders of those universities told U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Friday.

“Our HBCU medical schools are the backbone of training Black doctors in this country.” Dr. Hugh Mighty, Howard University’s senior vice president of health affairs, said at a hearing in Atlanta.

Students, meanwhile, told the independent senator from Vermont who chairs the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee that the heavy debt many aspiring physicians pile up is particularly discouraging to nonwhite students, whose families are less likely to be able to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition and fees.