[tjic]

Note that the AMA, run by doctors, is required by US law to give their approval before a new medical school may open, or an existing medical school can expand its program.

The doctors who would see their salaries fall if supply increased have complete control over supply.

This is complete regulatory capture, and it's terrible.

[themantalope]

While this is true, the real bottleneck is the availability of training positions. Other commenters have pointed out that these positions are generally increasing in number, but not nearly at a rate large enough to make up for the shortfall.

One positive argument to having a body like the AMA leverage some control over medical schools is that it helps to ensure that schools only open/expand if the AMA thinks that their students will have reasonably good chances of getting residency positions. It helps to avoid the sort of situation that is currently going on in law school and PhD programs where there are no where near enough positions available for all the students who are graduating from those programs.

And I do generally agree with you that there are some significant regulatory problems regarding training and residency positions, especially since residents have basically zero leverage at all.

[mattkrause]

It's confusing to me that there are not more programs that "convert" biomedical PhDs/postdocs into MDs. The PhDs and postdocs have some relevant background and are clearly fairly clever and motivated.

However, I looked into this after grad school and other than a new program at Columbia, there's not much. In fact, one person told me that since it was more than 5(?) years after I took intro bio, I would need to retake those classes--despite doing bio research for the entire intervening time. It's baffling that a PhD would quality one to teach a class to medical students, but not attend it.