[njtransit]

I always find it funny that doctors never think their huge salaries are part of the problem. Doctors in other countries earn way less than doctors here. That helps keep costs lower.

[cocoa19]

Huge salaries are not the direct problem, high cost of schooling in the US and the requirement to have an undergrad are.

Other countries allow you to go straight from high school to medical school, plus other countries have free schooling.

[nradov]

I'm all for lowering the cost of higher education but I'm skeptical that would bring down the cost of healthcare. Doctors who have long since paid off their student loans don't seem to be volunteering to take lower salaries; rather the opposite.

One approach could be to expand the availability of accelerated Baccalaureate-MD programs. Those cut education time by up to two years but are currently available at only a few schools.

https://students-residents.aamc.org/medical-school-admission...

[njtransit]

No, the issues is that the AMA convinced congress to limit the number of residencies available, which acts as a hard cap on the supply of doctors.

[undersuit]

A bunch of doctors do recognize the issue. Just like every other group there are a diverse set of opinions.

[njtransit]

Except in this case, the main group of doctors (the AMA) convinced congress to cap the number of residencies available to med school graduates explicitly to prevent the “over supply of physicians”.

[romanobro56]

What else did every doctor tell you?

[monero-xmr]

Rather than cutting salaries we should expand the ability earn an MD. But expanding medical school causes shrieks of hysterical anger from doctors. Same with importing foreign doctors. My pearls

[jtwaleson]

A friend of mine is an opthalmic surgeon. He does complex corneal transplants and cataract surgery etc.

He had 12 years of training before he could so his first surgery. Once he invited me to observe a couple of operations that he did, which was super interesting. He told me afterwards that smart people with steady hands could probably be trained in 3 months to do the routine surgical work.

[leosanchez]

Won't that be demand / supply issue ?

[jtwaleson]

Ultimately yes, but in healthcare, demand is fixed (to a large extent) and supply is tightly controlled as the education takes super long and hospitals only have limited residencies available.

[njtransit]

It is a supply issue. And supply is artificially limited by the AMA by limiting the number of residencies available.

[nradov]

Not really. Demand for healthcare is effectively infinite. Limiting the supply of doctors is one technique that governments use to control overall healthcare system costs. If patients have to wait months for a specialist appointment or elective surgery then that means fewer claims coming in.

Generally speaking the supply and demand curves taught in Econ 101 don't apply to healthcare.