Comment by qsera
5 days ago
> people entering the field specifically to make big money goes down...
This is a self defeating argument, because for it to work it requires that there is a larger number of people who love the field than the number of people who are in only for the $$$ (or else there will be even more scarcity of doctors)..
Which is not the case.
We have a surplus of people that want to become doctors and would work hard enough to do so. If we removed the artificial limits on residency, the supply of doctors would increase, which lowers wages somewhat, which lowers the number of people that want to become doctors. It reaches a new balance point with more doctors than before.
That itself is a good thing.
For it to also improve the motivations of doctors, all that needs to be true is that someone more motivated by money is more likely to be in the group that switches career.
It does not require the number of people that love the field to be a majority. Not that loving the field is a binary in the first place. People are a mix of motivations and cutoffs are arbitrary.
> It reaches a new balance point with more doctors than before.
But you just pull this "more doctors than before" out of your ass. There is no such assurance. If less people want to become doctors, then eventually there will be less doctors, not more.
I didn't pull it out of my ass. It's basic logic that if you remove a supply restriction then the supply goes up.
Let's attach fake numbers: Right now only 50 people can get residency each year, and 80 people starting college each year want to be doctors and would work hard enough. If you let everyone get residency, at first you'd make 80 doctors per year. This would decrease doctor pay and then only 75 people would want to be doctors, then 70. But if this ever dropped back near 50 for long, wages would spike back up, and the candidates would hit 80 again. It stabilizes in between, at 63.
With a bottleneck at X, and potential supply at Y, removing the bottleneck gets you a number between X and Y. All else equal, it can't stabilize below X. There will not 'eventually' be less doctors.
Alternatively don't even remove the bottleneck at first. Increase the residency bottleneck to 60. The number of potential doctors drops below 80, but it stays above 60, so now you have 60 doctors per year and the most money-motivated took a different major.
TL;DR: Let the number of residencies rise and the number of people that want to be doctors lower until they meet in the middle. Because residencies decide the actual number of doctors, meeting in the middle gives you more doctors.
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