RE: http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,178284,00.html

A lot of the medical MOSs were outsourced in late 80s/90s as they were not 'BOOTS ON THE GROUND". There was the effort to civilianize those positions they did not directly relate to combat power.

Also, for the Army at least, most of the Medical Services were transitioned to the Army Reserve because you would not need full up hospitals and things like Psych care unless you were fighting a war – no need to keep all those highly trained people on active duty.

Well, the bean counters successfully ‘saved money’ by taking those slots out of the active component and now its coming around to bite them in the b*t.

So now most of the Psych types working at military hospitals are contract employees and even if they are willing to deploy to the sand box it almost takes an act of congress to get them the permissions required.

You take a Army Reserve Doctor, who has spent years building up a private practice and sees what happens to them when they get mobilized.
1) They still have to pay facility leases,
2) They still have to pay for the equipment they purchased for their practice,
3) They still have to pay off their student loans (approx 10 years from the time they really got their practice going),
4) They still have to make the mortgage payments on the house they bought, based on their pay as a civilian doctor,
5) Their family living expenses rarely got go down that quickly, and they are not covered by military pay and special pay,
6) At the end of their mobilization it will take them 3-5 years to get their medical practice back to where it was pre-mobilization, at which point they are liable to be mobilized again. And that is only if their medical practice can recover,
7) Any wonder that most medical types get out of the Reserves after they have been mobilized?

Also, if you get right down to it, given the cost of medical school most doctors cannot afford to serve in the military to pay back their student loans. Hell, at a major university a Jock on a partial scholarship will get more than a science/medical type on a full scholarship.

But then we also have the ungrateful SOBs that get a full ride through college and medical school, get the MD and commission and then decide they don’t want to deploy because war is ‘bad’.