(1) is easily solvable given enough political will; a federal program funding medical loans in exchange for N years of post-education service in particular hosp

(1) is easily solvable given enough political will; a federal program funding medical loans in exchange for N years of post-education service in particular hospital systems. There are successful models for this in use in the army (both at the level of things like ROTC and also at the level of becoming a doctor-for-the-army); if the federal government's role in healthcare expands a program like this producing physicians for "general service" is entirely reasonable. (2) is correct in principle but without firmer #s it is hard to say if it's materially limiting. A look at an actual chart is revealing: http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/charts1982to2007.pdf http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/charts1982to2007.pdf ...page #3 (as printed on the page) has a matriculation chart: - in the 1982-3 period 16,597 students matriculated - in the 2006-7 period 17,759 students matriculated ...which is ~7% increase of 20 years. The last page has a graduation chart which is similarly flat. By comparison, the # of full-time fall enrollees at degree-granting institutions: - in 1982: 7,220,618 - in 2007: 11,269,892 ...which is a ~50% increase over 20 years ( cf http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables/dt08_188.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables/dt08_188.asp ). I've omitted part-timers as largely irrelevant wrt the # of future medical school students. Now it's possible that: - there's been a nearly-constant supply of students enrolled in college each year who are interested in and capable of becoming physicians - ...almost the entire 50% increase in student enrollment has been in students uninterested in medicine and/or incapable of becoming competent physicians ...but that extreme of a shift seems rather unlikely. What seems more likely is that medical schools have decided to hold class sizes mostly constant over the years, with a slight upward trend (which I'd wager is mostly accounted for by the opening of new medical schools over those decades, not by increased class size at existing institutions). If that scenario pans out -- that the pool of qualified candidates is larger than the current matriculants -- than while your point (2) is a limit on how far the supply of physicians can be increased it wouldn't be the case that we're necessarily close to that limit..