[R0b0t1]

> EDIT: oh, and heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US, while heart surgery is one of the most difficult specialties to get in to. They are absolutely never short on patients, lol.

This is still relevant to his concern, but from the other end. They might be making the labor artificially scarce to increase pay.

[ampdepolymerase]

> This is still relevant to his concern, but from the other end. They might be making the labor artificially scarce to increase pay.

This is very much true. I find that a lot of people in tech seem to put healthcare on a pedestal and believe that the professionalisation and gatekeeping of the industry create a better outcome than other engineering fields. This is very much untrue, the healthcare field is in need of massive disruption and lobbying to increase labor supply. You are being downvoted because a lot of tech people here hate to imagine that healthcare at the highest level is still subject to market forces like everything else. Medical training is being severely gatekept and hindered via the current apprenticeship/residency system. After all, we call the worst medical student, doctor. If you want to improve healthcare, tie medical school admission to the MCAT score, and only the MCAT score. You are not going to get better doctors just because candidates spend their summers building houses in some impoverished third world country.

[zaroth]

I live near Boston which is known for its medical centers, so this might skew things somewhat, but it seems like every graduate I know is going into medicine of some form (surgery, anesthesia, nursing, surgical tech, hospice, etc. etc.)

I heard consistently that residency slots are extremely competitive and a lot of qualified candidates get passed over. The more I learn about the process the more insane it seems.

From the student perspective you go from paying to work one day and spending most your time working cases with zero relevance to your actual specialty, to raking in several hundred thousand a year.

It also seems like hospital systems seem to spend more than half their capacity either dealing with patients that don’t need to be there but there’s literally no place to send them, or patients that are too far gone and untreatable but there’s literally no place to send them.

Healthcare is like a Gordian knot of terrible policies cemented into place by trillions of dollars of government spending.

[mensetmanusman]

We turn away beyond capable people, it’s just that we have decided to drastically reduce the number of doctors per capita by artificially limiting the number of medical schools.

[cfu28]

It's not the number of medical schools that is the issue, it's the amount of residency spots available after graduating med school (in the us).

[hwillis]

700k people per year in the US die from heart disease. There are ~18k surgeons (of all kinds) in the US. So even if 10% of them were cardiac surgeons, each surgeon has one person dying per day to worry about. They're busy.

Heart surgeries often happen on actively beating hearts. Tiny mistakes mean death. Infections mean death. Its a muscle which never gets rest, the majority of people in the US have clogged arteries and high blood pressure by the time they die.

Theres no artificial shortage. Heart surgery is really hard. Its the third hardest kind of surgery, right behind brains and rockets.

[Am4TIfIsER0ppos]

More like deliberately increasing demand for the service.

[zaroth]

Are you positing a conspiracy between McDonalds and Cardiothoracic Surgeons?

[Am4TIfIsER0ppos]

Absolutely. Government too.