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Comment by mech987987 | Hacker News Reader

If supply and demand don't set the number of surgeons, then who does?

Currently, the American Medical Association limits the number of new doctors being trained in medical school. The AMA judges this to be enough to attend to the population. The long working hours, high wages, and continuing shortage of doctors is direct evidence that their judgement is questionable.

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> If supply and demand don't set the number of surgeons, then who does?

Public policy. Have public education and graduate X number of doctors every year no matter what.

Free market doesn’t work well for essential services. Lobbying will artificially restrict supply to make more money at everyone else’s detriment. Demand for health is unbounded and any patient will value life over capital, so without forcing oversupply it will be exploitative.

If there is an organization which is arbitrarily limiting supply, it is not accurate to call it the "free market".

Graduating X doctors per year seems like a much worse solution than allowing to graduate however many are willing to learn.

There's no point in graduating more doctors per year if there are no residency program slots for them. We already have some students every year who graduate with an MD degree but are unable to practice because they can't obtain the necessary post-graduate training. We need to address that bottleneck first.

So instead of having one surgen work 100 hours, a novel concept might be 3 at 33.3 hours?

Surgeons have to complete the same amount of training regardless of how many hours they end up working per week after training. There is just no practical way to train three times as many surgeons: the teaching hospitals have nowhere near enough capacity.

In japan, they have large teaching hospitals where patients get treatment from several doctors, effectively free of charge, because you're paired with one senior doctor and several training doctors.

US teaching hospitals already have multiple residents delivering patient care under the supervision of an attending physician.

> no residency program slots for them

which is an artificial limitation. More positions can be generated easily, since there's a high demand for medical care and the costs currently are high to obtain medical care.

Until those residency programs have doctors sitting idle and twiddle their thumbs, the lack of position is just artificial in order to make it more competitive.

You appear to have a misunderstanding of the motivations and incentives here. The limit on residency program slots is not to make them more competitive but rather to hold down Federal government Medicare spending. If you want to help solve the problem then please ask your members of Congress to increase Medicare funding for residency programs.

https://savegme.org/

> if there is an organization which is arbitrarily limiting supply, it is not accurate to call it the "free market".

Free market is like communism: when it doesn’t work we can complain it wasn’t the true thing.

You can contrast it with the sciences

There's a joke that grad school and med school are polar opposites - med school is hard to get into and easy to get out of, while a PhD is easy to start and hard to finish

Being a postdoc sucks, and you have to be pretty willing to do something radically different than what you did as a student - but it isn't the end of the world.

I can't see a situation where it makes health in the US worse overall to increase the number of students.

You're confused. Scandinavia has the same organizations that limit the number of doctors trained in the same way.

I think the people in the bread lines in the USSR may have disagreed.

You can go ask the people on the bread lines what they think today. There are 34 million people living with food insecurity in the US alone. A triumph of efficient resource allocation!

Nice, "food insecurity", sounds like a weasel wording of "definitely have food, hence the obesity epidemic, but not securely".

The USSR was very efficient at resource allocation. Those who "needed" the resources the most got it. Of the resources that existed, that is.

Socialists would love this system to return, as, in their narcissism, they consider it inevitable that they'll be chosen among those who "need" it.

The equilibrium found between supply and demand implies the existence of "excess demand." For some, myself included, the choice between excess demand and efficient markets leans heavily toward reducing excess demand, despite it being less effecient.

It's almost like governance was handed over to a private organization, not elected by the people

The AMA has no power to limit the number of medical school slots. The actual limit is imposed by federal Medicare program funding for residency slots. The AMA has been actively lobbying Congress to increase those.

https://savegme.org/

You should really take 5 minutes to do some basic fact checking before making false accusations.

Can private funding fund residency training positions, sidestepping Congressional appropriations?

Sure, there is already some limited private funding for residency slots. If you have a few million dollars to spare you could probably endow a new slot at a teaching hospital. But in general the organizations that actually have a lot of money don't consider this a top priority.

Unions are fine on the us it seems, provided they are branded as an association

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