5 ms·
> The "wages will come down" argument is an absolute joke - at the end of the day, if there's one thing people will pay a high price for, it's "to stay alive".
by hcarvalhoalves 3y ago
> The "wages will come down" argument is an absolute joke - at the end of the day, if there's one thing people will pay a high price for, it's "to stay alive".
Good argument for universal public health care.
It’s absolutely dumb to have number of surgeons trained or number of patients undergoing surgery be a function of supply and demand. Enough surgeons should be trained to attend the population and it should be a normal career with normal working hours and a steady salary like any other.
- xhkkffbf 3y ago> Good argument for universal public health care. Doesn't always work out well. I was just in Canada and the evening news was filled with stories that the wonderful "free medical" system was shipping patients down to the US for surgery. I hope they got a good rate on bulk deal.
- jeezfrk 3y agoit works for all industrialized nations... but us. the question is how much do we want to waste and how many should die?
- mech987987 3y agoIf supply and demand don't set the number of surgeons, then who does? Currently, the American Medical Association limits the number of new doctors being trained in medical school. The AMA judges this to be enough to attend to the population. The long working hours, high wages, and continuing shortage of doctors is direct evidence that their judgement is questionable.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoThe equilibrium found between supply and demand implies the existence of "excess demand." For some, myself included, the choice between excess demand and efficient markets leans heavily toward reducing excess demand, despite it being less effecient.
- hcarvalhoalves 3y ago> If supply and demand don't set the number of surgeons, then who does? Public policy. Have public education and graduate X number of doctors every year no matter what. Free market doesn’t work well for essential services. Lobbying will artificially restrict supply to make more money at everyone else’s detriment. Demand for health is unbounded and any patient will value life over capital, so without forcing oversupply it will be exploitative.
- nsvd 3y agoIf there is an organization which is arbitrarily limiting supply, it is not accurate to call it the "free market". Graduating X doctors per year seems like a much worse solution than allowing to graduate however many are willing to learn.
- nradov 3y agoThere's no point in graduating more doctors per year if there are no residency program slots for them. We already have some students every year who graduate with an MD degree but are unable to practice because they can't obtain the necessary post-graduate training. We need to address that bottleneck first.
- nadermx 3y agoSo instead of having one surgen work 100 hours, a novel concept might be 3 at 33.3 hours?
- nradov 3y agoThe AMA has no power to limit the number of medical school slots. The actual limit is imposed by federal Medicare program funding for residency slots. The AMA has been actively lobbying Congress to increase those. https://savegme.org/ https://savegme.org/ You should really take 5 minutes to do some basic fact checking before making false accusations.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoCan private funding fund residency training positions, sidestepping Congressional appropriations?
- nradov 3y agoSure, there is already some limited private funding for residency slots. If you have a few million dollars to spare you could probably endow a new slot at a teaching hospital. But in general the organizations that actually have a lot of money don't consider this a top priority.
- sidewndr46 3y agoIt's almost like governance was handed over to a private organization, not elected by the people
- nikau 3y agoUnions are fine on the us it seems, provided they are branded as an association