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Comment by induscreep | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this about healthcare in the USA. Why not import a few thousand doctors from Asia through H1Bs, and drive down the cost of medical care? Remove artificial caps on licenses imposed by the AMA while at it.

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Because you have to spend years re-training and certifying to US standards, all the time without a job and earning money to pay for said training:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/02/15/172108835/shoul...

And that's putting aside the fact H1-Bs are not exactly easy to come by right now.

Not trying to undermine your point, but I believe it won't take much long to re-train those "imported" doctors. Only those who are ambitious and bright would come to the US and I have at least a handful of friends from the medical school in Myanmar, who were in the same class year as I was, already doing their residencies. Most of them took ~2-3 years of taking the USMLE and applying for hospitals in the US which sponsors H1B (mostly the rural ones). They seem to be liking what opportunity they've been given to as far as I can tell. I actually regret quitting med school there and leaving for college in the US after my 2nd year just because I want to be an aerospace engineer (turns out, I cannot because there's almost no company that would hire an H1B aerospace engineer, so I had to change my studies back to comp sci).

If the world made sense we would have doctors working 6 hour shifts at 100k a year rather than having one doctor work 12 hour shifts for 200k a year. But then you need people to actually want to be doctors rather than MBAs or financial accountants or lawyers, and strangely enough when the money isn't better and the work is way harder pressure to remove the artifical doctorate of medicine graduation rate caps is lacking.

The AMA is a very powerful lobbying group in the U.S. They have been able to steer regulations/laws on the state & federal level to limit competition.

Because the cost of healthcare isn't doctor's salaries. It's nursing care, medicines, hospital care and administrative fees.

Culturally, I suspect this would not go over well. There are a shocking number of people that would be less than impressed to be served by a doctor with a non-Anglo-Saxon last name, even if they spoke perfect English.

Especially older people, who are the largest consumers of healthcare.

People are accustomed to having foreign physicians, other-than-white physicians and certainly other-than-Anglo-Saxon physicians.

Nearly 30% of US primary care physicians trained abroad.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/health/12chen.html

Only 8.7% of the US are descended from the English (Anglo-Saxons)

Source: http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/c2kbr-35.pdf

That said, the US could easily recruit physicians from Europe including the UK so you may very well get more Anglo-Saxon physicians!

Good luck with that, considering europe already gets huge number of physicians from India.

http://www.ndtv.com/indians-abroad/india-biggest-exporter-of...

It doesn't follow that because many European physicians come from India that few European physicians would choose to work in the United States.

I don't think this is true. A "shocking number" doesn't mean "the majority" or anywhere close to it in this case, but rather more than there should be(none).

> Especially older people, who are the largest consumers of healthcare

the old bigots can learn to live with it.

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