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Comment by smallmancontrov | Hacker News Reader

Facilities can be built. Training programs can be expanded. Those are reasons why programs can't be doubled this year, but inside of a few years it's all possible. This problem has been cooking for decades.

What actually happened was cartel shit.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/03/09/r...

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I agree with this - in the US we have nurses picking up doctor roles (e.g. anesthesia), hours-worked caps, PAs (physician assistants) also picking up doctor roles, tons of international physicians coming for underserved specialities (family medicine, pediatrics, psych, etc).

And of course, residents super overworked. I think it speaks for itself that making medicine 2x - 3x more people per year would help the problem. Yes, there's a "sweet spot" where quality of doctors would drop, but there's also a sweet spot where services rendered drop due to overwork, and we're on the far side of that one

Yep, and it'll get worse before it gets better. The boomer wave will (continue to) hit faster than we can grow the system. The best time to fix it was a decade ago when everyone saw it coming, but the second best time is now.

“…doctor roles (e.g. anesthesia)…” Anesthesia has primarily been a nursing role, and it’s been this way since the American civil war. Physicians didn’t really want any part of it early on as it wasn’t very prestigious or lucrative. Nurse anesthetists have historically provided and continue to provide the vast majority of anesthetics, in the US at least.

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