Comment by tacticalturtle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tacticalturtle | Hacker News Reader

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I think requiring 11 years of post high school education (undergrad + medical school + residency) is a pretty big reason why we don’t have enough primary care doctors.

It’s such a huge investment of time and money, that it’s very hard to convince anyone to get into the field.

We have this immutable education track, seemingly because that’s the way we’ve always done it in the US. But I’d be very curious if we actually achieve better outcomes than countries with shorter medical educations.

The article mentions that NPs and PAs also favor higher lying specialties - but it seems much easier to solve that supply and demand problem than paying the cost for more MDs

There are far more med school applicants than spots every year. They can't expand because of residency constraints, sure all that stuff would lead to more people wanting to become doctors, but the people who want to be doctors now largely can't. That problem would only be worse with less education.

Actually the issue is not residency; basically everyone who graduates med school gets a residency.

The filter is on entering med school.

No. Med schools desperately want to expand because they make a ton of money, there are not enough residency slots for them to expand without competent graduates going unmatched.

While there are more residency spots that graduating medical students in the us every year, they do have to compete with foreign grads, of which there are more than enough. So the us grads can’t be completely and openly incompetent. So some of them do fail to even graduate, and obviously not get residency spots.

> We have this immutable education track, seemingly because that’s the way we’ve always done it in the US.

It's not: it's only been that way since the nineteenth century. There used to be a Bachelor of Medicine degree that represented six years or so of study and was sufficient to practice medicine.

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