> The number of people who are licensed is restricted because of the limited numbers of spots in medical and law schools and the high cost of attending For med

> The number of people who are licensed is restricted because of the limited numbers of spots in medical and law schools and the high cost of attending For medicine, this is wrong. The bottleneck is residency programs, not medical school. We graduate more medical students each year than we have residency spots available. And for residency programs, the limit isn't artificial - it's funding-driven. Residency programs run at a loss for hospitals, so most residency programs are funded through Medicare. > Even if you did it in your home country and are unquestionably qualified there is a long process you have to go through. Yes, and that's not to artificially limit the supply, but because training differs by country, and just because you're qualified by one country's standards doesn't mean you're qualified by another. And for what it's worth, the residency process is oftentimes much shorter for people who are licensed to practice in other countries, so it's not like they're starting from scratch. > Professional associations like the AMA (American Medical Association)... act as de facto unions w/o drawing the negative connotations that unions sometimes do in modern politics. The AMA may be the most-hated organization in the medical field. People who don't practice medicine hate the AMA, largely because they aren't clear on what the AMA is and is not responsible for, and often misattibute things to the AMA[0]. And practitioners hate the AMA because they are actually aware of what it does, and because the AMA has a long history of siding with payers (insurers) over practitioners. > The AMA even lobbies the government which sets the rates doctors get paid for medicare procedures and medicare is the largest payer in the healthcare system. If you think the role of the AMA is to ensure doctors get paid well by Medicare, then they're clearly not doing their job. Medicare reimburses, in the aggregate, 7% less than COGS. This means that, in effect, for every Medicare patient a private practitioner treats, they would end up having to provide their services for free, and then still pay an additional 7% out-of-pocket for each Medicare patient they treat, to cover the costs that Medicare doesn't. This is the reason that private practices are a dying breed, and why it's actually very difficult to find small practices which will accept "vanilla" Medicare. [0] For example, people often blame the AMA for limiting the number of medical school spots that are available, which is wrong on three counts: (1) The AAMC was responsible for this, not the AMA, (2) The AAMC has changed their policy and is now aggressively lifting this cap year upon year for a long time now, and (3) as I explained above, the number of medical school graduates isn't the bottleneck, so the AAMC's policy has no effect on the supply of doctors entering the market each year.