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Comment by tmh79 | Hacker News Reader

Residency programs are more restricted by funding for residency spots, not by the AAMC. Funding is, very weirdly, provided by Medicare. It's all a tangled mess with lots of weird stakeholders, but saying "doctors are using rent seeking behavior to limit new entrants to the field" is a bit disingenuous.

https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/how-medicare-s...

https://www.aamc.org/advocacy/gme/71178/gme_gme0012.html

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Doesn't the AAMC regulate the number of nurse practitioners? My understanding was that increasing the pool of nurse practitioners would help alleviate the cost of treatment for basic ailments, but that number is capped by an administrative body.

From what I've read, a lot of that is due to the prices set by the RUC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialty_Society_Relative_Val...

https://www.aafp.org/news/practice-professional-issues/20120...

Good for the doctors though, at least they're smart enough to bargain in their own interest.

Nothing in these articles supports your contention. The "tangled mess" is by design. By the people who stand to profit from it.

Allow foreign doctors to work in the us with a reasonable, attainable testing period of one year, and you will find no shortage of doctors in the us within the year.

I explained it to someone recently as this: "This biggest problem with the healthcare industry is that incentives are terribly misaligned and patchwork. Because most of the market is formed by accreted law rather than naturally, even incentives for a given participant (e.g. an insurance company) are usually different than what you'd expect."

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