A surprise veto that Gov. Charlie Crist issued last spring is threatening to reduce the number of new doctors being trained in a state that is already facing a physician shortage and limiting access to care.

With the quiet stroke of his pen, Crist cut $9.7 million in state support for Shands at the University of Florida, one of the state's largest teaching hospitals and charity care providers. The funding loss negatively affects Shands and the state's five other teaching hospitals, strains Florida's program for training its next generation of doctors and impacts Shands' ability to care for some of the state's poorest patients.

Fundamentally, the veto makes no fiscal sense. By eliminating $9.7 million in state funding, Florida will forfeit another $13 million in federal matching funds. Thus, a $9.7 million veto becomes a $23 million cut.

For Shands at UF alone, the state and federal funding loss totals $13.3 million. This is devastating, considering Shands receives no local tax support to fund its missions.

Shands provides training for 1,000 medical residents and fellows, while also paying for 100 of these future doctors on its own, without state or federal support.

This training is crucial because many Florida physicians are near retirement age and the state could lose as many as 5,000 doctors by 2013. If there aren't enough new doctors in the pipeline, there is less access to care for all Floridians.

As a major safety net hospital, Shands cares for people from all of Florida's 67 counties. Last year, it served 18,000 uninsured patients.

Patients travel long distances to Shands because it offers highly specialized care - a Level 1 trauma center, a burn center, organ transplant programs - that they can't get back home.

While Shands faces the deepest impact from the loss of funding, Florida's five other teaching hospitals are also impacted because they receive a portion of the federal matching funds: Jackson Memorial, already facing financial crisis, loses $4 million; Tampa General, $1.9 million; Shands Jacksonville, $1.6 million; Orlando Regional, $1.2 million; and Mount Sinai Medical Center, $1.1 million.

Crist's veto was particularly surprising, given that the funding had been in the state budget since 1981 and was long supported by governors and the Legislature. In fact, Crist included the funding in all four of his recommended budgets - even the one he submitted last spring.

In other words, he recommended the Legislature fund an item that he then vetoed.

Already, Shands has been forced to reduce the number of residency slots for new doctors and identify potential program and job cuts.

It also is being forced to restrict access to many non-emergency medical services for charity-care patients outside its 13-county primary service area who can receive those services closer to home.

The Legislature can fix this problem during its organizational session, slated for the third week of November. Please do so.

Tony Carvalho of Tallahassee is president of the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida, which represents the state's teaching hospitals.