Mitul Kanzaria is a first-year medical student, but for a few moments on Saturday night, he felt like an outsider in a public health system he hopes to join someday.

A student at Albany Medical College in New York, Mr. Kanzaria was one of about 45 students attending a regional conference of the American Medical Student Association, who participated in a simulation of what it's like to have no health insurance in America.

"This is really frustrating," Mr. Kanzaria said as he made his way through, "Walk in My Shoes"-- an interactive forum designed to highlight the hurdles many uninsured people face everyday as they try to get health care for their families.

The forum was held in the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, which hosted more than 200 medical students from Pennsylvania, New York and other states over the weekend.

Each participant in the forum was assigned a role, and they were either a person trying to obtain health care or a health care administrator serving customers.

"This is a program that was created to be an effective tool for educating people about specific health access problems that a wide range of people face everyday," said Deborah Katz, a policy analyst and community organizer with Community Catalyst Inc., a Boston-based national public health advocacy organization.

Ms. Katz explained that the program, which was created five years ago in Lansing, Mich., is often an eye-opening way to show people how hard it can be to for many people trying to navigate the American public health system.

The character roles assigned to the medical students included categories like the families of low-income earning people, minorities, immigrants and non-English speaking people, groups that must negotiate their way through a system that is often not too friendly to them.

Mr. Kanzaria and a colleague, Ninad Pendharkar, a fourth-year medical student at Penn State, played the roles of a white, middle-aged, gay couple trying to get health coverage for back pain and dental problems.

Both of them were employed, but only one of them had medical insurance. The couple was faced with a myriad of bureaucratic hurdles each way they turned, from trying to see a dentist or a doctor for back pain, or trying to get a partner added to a health plan.

"This is very frustrating for us, but it is also very true for many people out there," Mr. Pendharkar said after several make-believe medical providers and health plan administrators turned him down on every round.

"It's an eye-opener," he said. "As physicians, we are being trained to focus on treating the ailments of the patients, but we often never have the chance to really appreciate what patients go through just to see us."

Many times, the people who are most on the outside of American public health have to deal with a variety of issues just to get help, and often times, public health officials and administrators don't take their struggles into account, Ms. Katz said.

It is because of that disparity that the American Medical Student Association conference organizers decided to introduce interactive forums like "Walk in My Shoes," said Jay Bhatt, the organization's national president.

"Having this kind of seminar gives all of us a more insightful view of public health, which is more tangible than a PowerPoint presentation," said Mr. Bhatt, a fourth-year student at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine.

"As physicians, we need to have more compassion for our patients, and this is a good way to start," he said.