[ampdepolymerase]

> This is still relevant to his concern, but from the other end. They might be making the labor artificially scarce to increase pay.

This is very much true. I find that a lot of people in tech seem to put healthcare on a pedestal and believe that the professionalisation and gatekeeping of the industry create a better outcome than other engineering fields. This is very much untrue, the healthcare field is in need of massive disruption and lobbying to increase labor supply. You are being downvoted because a lot of tech people here hate to imagine that healthcare at the highest level is still subject to market forces like everything else. Medical training is being severely gatekept and hindered via the current apprenticeship/residency system. After all, we call the worst medical student, doctor. If you want to improve healthcare, tie medical school admission to the MCAT score, and only the MCAT score. You are not going to get better doctors just because candidates spend their summers building houses in some impoverished third world country.

[zaroth]

I live near Boston which is known for its medical centers, so this might skew things somewhat, but it seems like every graduate I know is going into medicine of some form (surgery, anesthesia, nursing, surgical tech, hospice, etc. etc.)

I heard consistently that residency slots are extremely competitive and a lot of qualified candidates get passed over. The more I learn about the process the more insane it seems.

From the student perspective you go from paying to work one day and spending most your time working cases with zero relevance to your actual specialty, to raking in several hundred thousand a year.

It also seems like hospital systems seem to spend more than half their capacity either dealing with patients that don’t need to be there but there’s literally no place to send them, or patients that are too far gone and untreatable but there’s literally no place to send them.

Healthcare is like a Gordian knot of terrible policies cemented into place by trillions of dollars of government spending.

[mensetmanusman]

We turn away beyond capable people, it’s just that we have decided to drastically reduce the number of doctors per capita by artificially limiting the number of medical schools.