America’s aging population is leading to a doctor shortage crisis

Source? The only news i've read of shortages are Brexit related.

https://journal.practicelink.com/vital-stats/physician-compe...

If you thought Silicon Valley engineers had it well, think again. The 500-1000k doctors are real and listed right there, unlike the mythical staff engineer who hit the jackpot at a GAFA and can only live in the valley.

Keep in mind that H1B workers are always paid 10-20% less than local workers, so doctors actually make more than these numbers.

Undergraduate medical education in Europe is commonly five or six years so yes, it could really be streamlined. If summers weren’t taken off you could fit medical school into four years. “Weed our and tire out” makes it sound like there are people who drop out of medical school when it barely happens at all.

The market for doctors is fairly constant, it's very difficult to mint new doctors. Even if a state or university went through the enormous undertaking to create a new med-school, they would, at best, create 200-300 new doctors a year, a drop in the bucket.

The real solution is in alternative degrees like Physician Assistants or Nurse Practitioners. They can get degrees at half the cost of doctors and yet do 80% of a doctor's work.

Any real cost reductions in U.S. healthcare will have to include these alternative healthcare providers.

There are three basic ways the AMA cartel hurts healthcare:

1. First, as others have pointed out, there is an significant artificial restriction in supply of physicians. Many more people could be admitted to medical school, successfully finish training, and practice well than there are now.

2. There's an artificial restriction in the supply of providers, and more deeply, an artificial restriction in the schema we have about who we get services from and how they're trained. The AMA uses FUD to reinforce a model where the only appropriate training model is undergraduate -> MD -> residency -> post residency, and because almost everything pertaining to well-being is health, those who have undergone that training model supercede others regardless of training history.

At least in the US, we don't really question this assumption at all, even though there's no evidence it's superior to a different model that has different routes, like undergraduate -> specialty training -> broadening of training, or undergraduate -> broad non MD medical training -> additional training. Mix and match however you want. Whenever other provider types have broadened their training (dentists, psychologists, optometrists, etc.) there has always been pushback from the AMA, and the scientific evidence has never supported that pushback. So why not allow LPNs, PAs, pharmacists, optometrists, dentists, psychologists, audiologists, etc. to broaden their scope of practice, with the appropriate background and training?

The insistence on the undergrad -> MD -> residency model becomes even more absurd when you consider how brief MD training programs are becoming. It's not uncommon for them to only have 2 or even 1.5 years of academic coursework, with the rest clinical training, so how is that actually different from, say, a PA with additional years of experience in practice? Especially when you consider PA programs often require more medical experience before entering than medical school entrants -- it's all 1.5-2 years of coursework plus years of hands-on supervised clinical training.

3. This cartel actually hurts physicians as well, by increasing their workloads to impossible extents, and by creating artificial restrictions in specialty certification. This gets a lot less attention and is maybe harder to explain, but the licensure and specialty certification requirements are also getting more and more absurd, to the point that in many specialties they no longer realistically reflect actual skill, and are simply ways to further increase the rent-seeking advantages within medicine, and to line the pockets of the AMA and specialty organizations.

Practice and provider regulations, in my opinion, are one of the major drivers of healthcare costs in the US, and it almost never gets any discussion, because it's immediately shutdown. The argument is "if you in any way increase the supply of providers providing care, under any other model than an MD, people will get hurt."

I say this as someone who has worked in healthcare and has many immediate family working in healthcare, in a variety of roles, from nurses, to physicians, to other professional roles.

(See also: opioid crisis and cannabis regulation for how well our current regulatory system is working.)