[Robotbeat]

Increasing the supply doesn't mean the average quality of care will fall.

If I pay doctors $400,000 a year to work 80 hours a week and then double the number of doctors and pay them $200,000 a year to work 40 hours per week, the quality of care would almost certainly improve but costs would be constant. And actually, do we pay doctors a premium for those overtime hours where they're actually probably less effective? If so, our costs would go down as quality of care improves.

[ProjectArcturis]

In theory, if you want to train twice as many doctors, you have to relax admissions criteria to let in twice as many people, and the new admitees wouldn't have qualified under the previous system.

[GloriousKoji]

But what if the limiting factor of admission criteria isn't scoring well but things like crippling amount of debt, archaic culture of hazing and adversity to stupid hours?

[Robotbeat]

Right. Are doctors ubermensch who are the cream of the crop or did they just have a high tolerance for abuse? I’m not sure being ultra-selective gets you people who are fundamentally better doctors nor are the returns gonna be very linear even if they were. I’d much rather have enough well-rested doctors than have more “select” but highly stressed, sleep deprived doctors.

[convolvatron]

you're kind of assuming that the metrics that the use to admit students are predictive of care quality. thats certainly not true, but who knows how not true?