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Comment by davycro | Hacker News Reader

A 51 year old man came into the hospital yesterday with chest pain. He was having a major heart attack. I watched the cardiologist catheterize and stent his coronaries. i saw the moment that the stent opened the coronary artery. I saw the blood flow restored to the left heart. The patient was 51, and that doctor, with the flick of his wrist, added decades to the mans life. That doctor does this everyday.

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From the article:

    Diminishing marginal returns: some tasks performed by
    doctors have more impact than others. If there were one
    fewer doctor, the highest impact tasks they perform would
    be given to someone else, so the total impact wouldn’t
    reduce proportionally with the number of doctors.

In other words, that operation probably did add decades to this man's life, but this is the kind of critical care that we would find someone else to do if this doctor hadn't been there to do.

The question is, if you're considering becoming a doctor, what's the potential benefit that's due to your choices? How much good do you do that wouldn't have happened anyway?

But we have a shortage of doctors in this country (USA) at least, due to cartel controls on med school. More doctors, modestly paid, could serve more people currently underserved.

Most people who go through the extensive training required to be a doctor want more than "modest pay" as a result, and rightly so. And doctor pay is not the cause of the high cost of health care. Doctors could all work for free and all else remaining the same you'd hardly notice the difference.

A shortage due to med school controls won't be relieved by more people deciding to apply to med school, because the numbers there are fixed. To fix that you need to get the controls relaxed.

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