[joshAg]

It's usually not a random degree. Usually it's like biology or molecular and cellular biology or maybe biochemistry or something like that, where the major itself is applicable to more than just medical school, it just happens to perfectly or nearly so overlap with medical school requirements.

An MD post-secondary degree is like 6 years, right? An undergrad and MD in the US is 8 years, so the difference isn't that much. That's basically just the general education requirements for an undergraduate degree, which as far as I can understand is just a general difference of the US vs european systems. US bachelors include a generality component absent in European degrees so the typical US undergrad takes a year or so longer than the typical European undergraduate degree.