Why did the Department of Health state there was a surplus? What policy decisions allowed them to make that recommendation? What mechanisms meant medical schools, who have an incentive to increase class size, reacted the way they did? What is the difference in salary for “DO’s”? What part do HMOs and insurance companies play, who surely have an incentive to lower the cost of medicine?
One argument is tacit collusion to “inflate salaries” which may be part of it, but if this accounts for all of the impact then it is a scandal and evidence of institutional corruption that should be paraded in the streets. I’d imagine a class action lawsuit by students who didn’t make it into med school against the DoH. I don’t think this answers it all.
In any case, I think the uppermost level of medicine will get decimated by AI. It’s mostly knowledge work with a focus on experience. It feels like the perfect use case for generative AI. On the other hand having more people doing the manual work (putting in a catheter etc) will likely last a lot longer as robotics has seemed to stall in advancements.