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Yeah it's a pretty sticky meme but it just isn't true.
Same with the "AMA cartel restricts supply!!!!" argument.
You can still claim that doctors are overpaid, but that overpay if present is not the cause of costs.
Keep on snarkily dismissing it rather than refuting it.
The argument that more doctors won't help drive down costs is like saying back in 1950s that "More computers won't drive down the cost of computers! It'll just make the computers worth half as much!" Markets are dynamic and create incalcuable knock-on effects that are impossible to fully model. But what we do know is that if supply is artifically restricted while demand surges, there are shortages.
There's little reason (outside of your compensation) to believe more doctors wouldn't have positive effects. More doctors, the lack of which is continuously identified as the bottleneck in American healthcare, incentivizes more economies of scale for the production of medical goods, testing, and services. Less regulation around practicing medicine creates different tiers of services, like what has already happened with APNs and urgent care, which somehow cost less while delivering superior patient care.
More doctors mean less less litigation risk and less demands on the extant force, which as you admit is severely overworked (which renders them more likely to engage in malpractice). Dismissing the well-known economic ramifications of cartels particularly in the face of inelastic demand is protesting too much.
Yes, you like money and would like more of it and will use any rationale to arrive to maintain your miserable but lucrative career trajectory because it works for you and any attrition, whether of doctors or of patients, just means a larger slice of the pie for you.
That's great. I don't buy it.
There is a surplus of medical students and residency slots every year. AMA lobbies for increased supply of providers.
You can verify these for yourself if you'd like.
And why are there vacancies in residencies?
Because the AAMC is exempted from federal antitrust laws due a rider in a time-sensitive bill that no one actually discussed in committee.:
It's so not a cartel that critical components must be exempted from laws targeting cartels.
Great! Abolish the match. All the trainees are down. I'm down. I'm not sure it's a good idea but I'm down.
That's also not the problem (the problem is that programs with unmatched slots would rather have nobody than the available candidates in SOAP/candidates available in SOAP would rather take a year off than go to those programs). Also all kinds of slots exist in a gray area outside the match.
But by all means abolish the match. Institutional memory for why it exists is low enough that people are willing to give it a shot.
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