Can You Buy Your Way Into Residency?

What’s the going rate for a residency position these days?

If you believe the posts on medical Reddit channels, it’s $150,000 to $200,000.

Two different commenters who apparently did not match into a program this year posted in r/IMGreddit that they were offered residency positions in that price range, by a specific company.

While it may sound unbelievable, there’s precedent that such transactions have occurred in the past. One piece of evidence comes from a lawsuit, while another comes through New York prosecutors.

Varun Chopra, MD, graduated from American University of Antigua in 2009, and applied to residency programs in the U.S. and Canada unsuccessfully for 7 years, landing not even an interview in the U.S., and no offers in Canada despite seven interviews, according to court documents.

In 2016, however, Chopra’s parents learned through a family friend of an opportunity to donate $400,000 to Physicians Medical Center in Michigan, which now appears to be operating as Pontiac General Hospital, to obtain a residency position, the documents stated.

Ultimately, Chopra’s parents paid the $400,000 via two checks, according to the documents.

Chopra was set to start his residency at the hospital on November 1, 2016, and began his observership on October 3 of that year. However, by October 26, he had become “disassociated” from the residency, the documents stated.

While the hospital argued that Chopra withdrew from the program, Chopra maintained he was dismissed. His parents then asked for a refund.

When the hospital refused to return the money, asserting it was a donation, the family took their case to court — and won. In 2018, a jury awarded Chopra $484,000.

In 2010, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance alleged that Alexander Everest was running a medical residency scam, claiming that he tried to bribe a New York hospital employee into admitting four trainees into the hospital’s residency program.

At the time, Everest was the chair of now-defunct Elite American Health Systems, which claimed it could help connect hopeful residents with hospitals, according to news reports. He allegedly paid thousands of dollars to an employee who dealt with residency records at Harlem Hospital — but that employee reported the payments to hospital officials, who turned to prosecutors, according to Vance.

Prosecutors claimed that hopeful residents would pay at least $100,000 each to secure residency slots, and that Everest “marketed himself to medical school graduates, particularly of international medical schools.”

It’s not clear if Everest was ever convicted of those crimes. When MedPage Today reached out for comment, Vance said he didn’t “recall the case or how the case was resolved. It occurred very early in my administration.”

Both of the Reddit posters named Residents Medical as the company offering the residency positions.

Bryan Carmody, MD, MPH, a pediatric nephrologist at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, who runs a popular blog about residency and the Match process, said in a blog post that he heard from several unmatched applicants who were “approached by a well-known IMG [international medical graduates] consulting firm that claimed to have both internal medicine and family medicine positions available for sale.”

“To find out more details, like the specific position available, the applicants would have been required to sign a non-disclosure agreement,” Carmody wrote in his post.

Carmody told MedPage Today that some IMGs come from affluent backgrounds and are likely able to afford such high fees.

As of press time, Residents Medical had not returned a request for comment from MedPage Today.

One of the Reddit posters, who could not be reached for comment, noted that they reported the offer to the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP).

In an email, a spokesperson for the NRMP said the organization “has no objective evidence of these claims. Should objective evidence become available, the NRMP will investigate as appropriate.”

Please enable JavaScript to view the

comments powered by Disqus.