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Comment by exolymph | Hacker News Reader

Homelessness and world hunger are not bottlenecked by money. There's a stronger case for healthcare, but that's also substantially a political issue.

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There's a stronger case for world hunger being bottlenecked than healthcare. World hunger is a logistics problem now, but no amount of money lets you print doctors.

Actually funding education via wealth distribution is a great way of ”printing doctors”.

I don't know what wealth distribution means in this context, or why it's relevant at all, but food grows fast and doctors take like 20 years to grow no matter how much money you throw at it or where you get the money. And the context above was more specifically "fully pay health care costs" which is a comical fantasy the moment you try to actually define what that means, because the limit is not the price.

simply, we have a scarcity of healthcare because we don’t invest the wealth we collectively produce in healthcare.

Or most people, really. We are letting it accrete around more of itself and don't clean up and redistribute.

Changing the entire paradigm of medical care would be possible with enough money. There's no logical reason it takes 20 years to become a doctor. The fact that it does severely hampers both the quantity and quality of doctors. Becoming a doctor is much less about knowledge and intelligence than it is about attrition resistance. Loads of capable students disregard medical careers each year for more rapidly attainable positions. In many cases these are the MOST capable students because they recognize the problems with pursuing medical degrees.

Certainly the most skilled and advanced in the medical field will need significant schooling but there needs to be a major reform in healthcare training. One that produces more knowledgeable and skilled professionals and not a glut of questionably competent nurse practitioners.

With a little bit of lag time (school) we could have a metric fuckton of doctors. We have a metric fuckton of shitty lawyers. Doctors are artificially gated in the US

What’s the joke? “What do you call the person who graduated last in their class from med school? A doctor.”

Sure, I think that helps my point. You can't create "good" doctors out of thin air with money, just "more" doctors, and it takes forever.

Do we really need "good" doctors all of the time? I think the industry is overregulated to restrict the supply of healthcare.

When a simple easy to make mistake will kill me, I'm pretty sure I want to have a good doctor all the time.

Isn't that gap being filled nowadays with roles like nurse practitioners?

The optimal amount of bad doctors is not zero. But there is a point of "ChatGPT does a better job than this man does, and we're talking GPT-4o, not GPT-5 Pro". In which case we have a problem.

It’s funny how some people think shitty lawyers are good and some people think good lawyers are shitty, huh?

You can't just throw money at the world hunger problem, it will end up in some warlord's coffers. Hunger still exists because it is politically useful to keep people hungry.

A logistics problem is just a money problem, throw enough cash at it and you can get anything moved to anywhere

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