Then imagine that there are some people who can't afford the food they need in the grocery store and are going to die.
Alternatives and transparent pricing isn't going to make brain surgery affordable to the average consumer.
Alternatives and transparent pricing isn't going to make brain surgery affordable to the average consumer.
This incentivises people to become doctors that perform such complecated procedures as it takes a lot of time and a lot of money to be able to do those things.
If you were to force doctors to perform work on people that can't afford it, then presumably they will earn less money. If they earn less money, there is less incentive to do that kind of work as they will pick something easier and more profitable.
You will end up with fewer people to do brain surgery.
First, to become a practicing doctor of any sort one first completes med school then a residency and (depending on specialty) fellowship. The med school part is more or less the same for all physicians from your GP to brain surgeons to psychiatrists. Many folks take out loans to cover med school.
The residency and fellowship parts are paid. In practical terms this means a person becoming a neurosurgeon needs no more loans or upfront cash than a person becoming a GP. (I assume everyone is familiar with opportunity cost so will leave that part unsaid)
As an aside, much of the funding for these programs comes from the public (via Medicare).
All this means, the cost of becoming a neurosurgeon is about the same as any other specialty.
As for the supply side entry to med school and selection to residency programs are the big bottlenecks.
Med schools are accredited via doctors trade bodies. This means doctors (not market forces) decide how many new folks can become doctors.
As previously mentioned, residencies are largely funded via Medicare already. However, the number of residents has been capped since 1996. In that period of time the US population has grown by about 60 million (25%).
You may have been familiar with all this, but I think the context is important for discussing market solutions to healthcare — there are a lot of distortions around the US having anything resembling market behaviors.
This gives doctors a way to pay out their colossal student debt, though!
I don't need brain surgery every tuesday.
https://aansneurosurgeon.org/departments/neurosurgical-workf...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/17/wealth-gap-...
Also, if you are a doctor and your primary motivation is helping people, wouldn't you want to help many people with simple problems, than few people with highly complex problems (which most likely have a higher risk of failure)? There is already a shortage of doctors doing the easy stuff.
I just don't see the incentive for doing difficult procedures other than with money.
Your analysis completely falls flat here. Not all doctors are motivated by the same things and yet most of them would consider their primary motivation helping people.
Neurosurgeons are a prime example. They would very much prefer few complex cases (not everyone gets a brain tumor thankfully) as their way to maximize benefit rather than manage cholesterol meds for 100s.
Speciality surgeons by their nature are motivated by a certain degree of risk.
The incentive for doing difficult procedures is often because they are challenging. Compensation for doctors in the US isn’t fully correlated with difficulty either... with no offense to my dermatology colleagues making more than most general surgery sub specialists.
That's fair. I probably over-emphasized the money part of it.
> The incentive for doing difficult procedures is often because they are challenging.
We can assume that since doctors aren't doing this for free or at least cheap already, that they require at least some amount of compensation. To return to my original point, if you force doctors to perform procedures on people that can't afford them, and the amount they receive is less than they want, then there be a greater shortage of such doctors.
> Compensation for doctors in the US isn’t fully correlated with difficulty either... with no offense to my dermatology colleagues making more than most general surgery sub specialists.
Not directly anyway, it's probably more supply/demand. Low supply of neurosurgeon means high cost. Whether that's from artificially suppressing the supply of these doctors or because it's very challenging is up for debate.
I'd guess dermatologists make so much because people are more willing to spend money on that sort of work.
Next we look to that "scorecard" (bank account) which is the value provided but not called upon and get to see if we can call in enough "favors" to afford the healthcare
Now s/food/health