> Doctors _should_ be a dime a dozen. They should not cost so much - because their services are valuable and therefore, more of them should be produced to make medical costs lower.

Physician salaries make up about 8% of medical costs. And even if you doubled medical school class size, you wouldn’t get 2x the doctors because there aren’t enough resident slots available.

And even if you had enough slots available, you’d still need to guarantee high salaries afterwards. Most people who are smart/driven enough to be doctors aren’t going to work 80-100 hours in a high stress position for 3 years if they are only going to come out making $80k.

So the only way to drastically increases (3x,4x) the supply of doctors is to drastically decrease the standard of training.

So you reduce residency down to 1 year and you triple the number of doctors. Now you’ve reduced the quality of doctors, and you save people less 5% in healthcare costs, but no one even notices because that number gets drowned out by the continued rise in the other 92% of healthcare costs.