What is artifical when talking about a program that subsidizes residency?
Focus on limited federal residency funding seems to be a red herring. Most modern economic analyses seems to show residency programs are net profitable before federal subsidies.
IMO the problem is largely structural, around how these are positions and services are handeled by regulation and insurance.
I suspect people overweight it for reasons above. Underweight factors would the long US education path to become a doctor being twice that of many countries, and extremely high cost and high accreditation of medical schools.
By way of hypothetical, if we doubled residency funding. Would new doctors double, go up 10%, or stay the same?
If education time and obscene school costs are the bottle neck, it might not matter much. Some 25% of residents are already paid out of pocket by hospitals because residents make hospitals money.
If we cut it entirely, what would happen?
I just dont see why it is or must be the case for the reasons I already posted.
I have a nephew training to be a doctor now. He's looking at $500k in student loan debt by the end. That's a major problem.
If it's his own private practice then yeah, he pockets a lot of that 250k. If he's working for a hospital, then he has basically no influence on the price he's not payed per surgery.