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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

> If you want better healthcare you don't need to invent anything new or "disrupt systems of oppression". Just pick another country where it's working and do what they do.

Sure. That's like telling me that if I want to win an Olympic gold medal, I should just do what Phelps does. It'll work, right?

Even those countries may only have metastable healthcare economics, and while it looks as if it works now it could fail in the future. In the short term.

> Largely, they have a lot more doctors, hospitals and MRI machines per capita than we do,

So you're saying that all we need to do is have more resources that we don't have more of?

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The AMA artificially caps the number of doctors and hospitals we have to increase salaries and costs. So no it doesn't necessarily take more resources to do these things

They've backed off on that and I think support more residency slots for training doctors now, but it actually is a funding issue because Medicare pays for a lot of that.

We also have very high to impossible standards for training doctors, and our residency rotation program requires you to not sleep because it was designed by a literal coke addict.

Which is dumb because there’s plenty of money to pay the residents otherwise.

The AMA has reversed position from their 1990s lobby to limit residency slots (which got enacted under the Republican "Contract with America"). At this point, increasing funding for residency slots would be seen as increasing government spending and is politically unpalatable.

medical school admissions is such a zero sum pissing contest of schmoozing profs for research positions, building houses for free in africa, grinding academics far past the point where the knowledge is beneficial, sheer perseverence, and sometimes being the right skin colour. the US could 10x the number of residency spots (and therefore med school spots) without significantly diminishing the capability of the incoming class to be good doctors.

You can simply buy more MRI machines and open more hospitals, yes.

The US has "certificate of need" laws saying you can't open a hospital unless all the nearby competitors allow it first. We could just not do that.

> Sure. That's like telling me that if I want to win an Olympic gold medal, I should just do what Phelps does. It'll work, right?

America is the #1 country at a lot of things. Surely you're not going to let Australia, Japan, the Netherlands etc beat you on this.

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