Any job or grad program that requires a college degree but will accept any and all majors is engaging in pure credentialism.
So, sure, you can enter med school with a BA in English, but you still have to have taken undergraduate level organic chemistry.
Practically speaking, that means at each school there's 1 or 2 majors that will hit the typical premed requirements in the course of completing the undergraduate degree and a handful of other majors where a minor or even less than that will allow you to complete the premed requirements.
But all that said, yeah, they engage in blatant credentialism because they use it as a way to filter students out, because there's a much smaller supply of available medical school positions than there is demand for medical school positions. It's so blatant that it's usually better to go to a school with grade inflation or a less rigorous school where you know you can max out the GPA, than to go to the toughest undergraduate school you can because admissions doesn't do a great job of leveling different schools, so a 4.0 from University of Grade Inflation can still beat out a 3.5 from a more-renowned university.
This way is more revenue for BigEd though.
An MD post-secondary degree is like 6 years, right? An undergrad and MD in the US is 8 years, so the difference isn't that much. That's basically just the general education requirements for an undergraduate degree, which as far as I can understand is just a general difference of the US vs european systems. US bachelors include a generality component absent in European degrees so the typical US undergrad takes a year or so longer than the typical European undergraduate degree.
Also, that's not to mention the many "pre-med" classes that medical schools require for applicants. Are high school kids going to take the organic chemistry, biochem, etc. necessary for med school?
That doesn’t mean that they didn’t need to understand calculus as a prerequisite to other classes where they did learn skills they use frequently.
MDs also aren’t technicians, they are a self regulating group of professionals with a high degree of legally protected autonomy and authority. Individually they make life or death decisions more frequently than anyone else. And as a group they make up regulatory bodies that impact everyone’s medical care. Like lawyers they have a very disproportionate impact on society. I think some amount of general education and general science background is appropriate.
Why can't med school teach all the classes needed for med school?
2. Making a decent grade in those classes at an accredited school is a good filter.
3. MDs aren’t just technicians. They are leaders, managers, and ethicists. They have a higher level of legally protected autonomy than nearly any other profession. Given that, I think that 2 years of general education is appropriate. For the same reasons I think general education is appropriate for other professions with a high degree of autonomy, authority, and impact, e.g., civil engineers, lawyers, and teachers (all the teachers reading this are laughing at the autonomy part).
Due to the competitiveness of getting a place on a medicine course, it's pretty much impossible to get into a medicine degree here in the UK without having taken Physics, Chemistry and Biology at A-level, and maybe maths too. So... yes.
Note also: medical degrees are longer than other degrees in Europe (5 years instead of the standard 3 here in the UK). But you go directly into a specialised medicine course. I think you can do a graduate medicine degree in 4 years if you have an undergraduate degree in a related field, but that's relatively uncommon.