The relevant question is: what is keeping the supply of specialists from growing to meet the demand? The AMA is essentially a guild. Everything it does in the

The relevant question is: what is keeping the supply of specialists from growing to meet the demand? The AMA is essentially a guild. Everything it does in the name of quality is also a highly-effective way to keep wages high for its members. And that's hardly a coincidence. Could an innovative medical school train a particular kind of specialist to be just as effective in half the time, at half the cost? We'll never know, because that kind of innovation is illegal. The balance between cost and quality is not black and white. Plenty of patients might very well prefer to trade off one for the other. Today they have no choice -- there is only one standard, and the providers have every incentive to make that standard as expensive as possible.