Hacker News Reader

Comment by llamaimperative | Hacker News Reader

You just spend more money to scale the program. Funding for the residency program has been frozen since the late 90s, the demand for doctors has not been.

View on HN

You can't "just" spend more on residency training without also "just" making med school classes bigger. You can't "just" expand med school classes without "just" increasing teaching staff, who are 9 times out of 10 physicians themselves. And very few physicians are going to willingly turn down $500k/yr clinical jobs to teach for a fraction of that.

You’re describing problems that are all solved by money.

And time. You double the number of residency slots but it will take years to fill them if you increase med school size at the same time, a type of coordination that is very unlikely.

30 years is a lot of time. I agree with GP. Starting back then would have been best; starting now would be second. I live in a country that has twice the number of medical school graduates per 100k population than the US, and unsurprisingly compared to the US it's easier to get general medical and specialist attention.

Oh okay. Guess we’ll just continue to have 1997 level supply of doctors forever.

I don’t even know what argument you’re trying to make here? It’ll take time to solve? Yeah, obviously. That’s why we should start ASAP and given that we don’t have a time machine, that’d mean right now.

The supply of new doctors (and residents) should at least keep pace with population growth. For whatever reason, we spent nearly two decades keeping this number flat even as population grew by 70 million. We shouldn't have to double these numbers, they all should have organically increased at a reasonable pace. But for a variety of reasons they didn't and now we have to fix the problem.

Why do we blame this on medical lobbies when it appears to be the same issue across the board for funding state education departments?

Because it’s a different issue with different principals involved.

Does the federal government set the national number of teachers who can be trained each year?

I have no idea, but that’s not the point. The funding they put into each state’s education budget, combined with that state’s policy effectively limits hiring.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com