> Well the alternate is capacity. They only have so many doctors on staff to supervise which limits the slots. Think of it as a management problem. First: res

> Well the alternate is capacity. They only have so many doctors on staff to supervise which limits the slots. Think of it as a management problem. First: residents are doctors. Second: Yes, they ratio of residents to attendings is fixed, by law, as is the number of hours that they're allowed to work per week. Both of those were fixed because we found that working residents 100-120 hours/week and without enough attendings resulted in mistakes and people dying. Since this ratio is fixed, it means that hiring 4 more residents also means hiring an additional attending, and you only get an additional 320 resident-hours/week from them. It turns out that this isn't profitable, because if it were, more hospitals would do it.