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by alfiedotwtf 797 days ago
Not always.

If I sell garden gnomes wearing knitted hats, but I only make three a year and sell to only people who drive yellow cars, I doubt I could earn a decent living off this

1 comments

Don’t be obtuse. You’re comparing garden gnomes with healthcare.
I mentioned garden gnomes as an example of how supply side economics and “scarcity drives demand” doesn’t work.
The post you replied to scoped their statement to „coveted“ applications. No one actually believes scarcity drives demand in all cases.
The grammar of the sentence, as written, would really indicate otherwise. Written in the post: "Scarcity drives demand." (exact quote)

The sub-text is that doctors are slightly corrupt and wish to be payed more, and therefore are incetivized to reduce the total number of doctors.

After reading the travails of what this doctor is going through, that seems like a very callous take, insulting even.

It’d be callous and insulting if it was a reasoned position.
IDK if needs to be reasoned or not. I'm imagining someone making these comments to the author's face after having been read the article. The 'callous' part comes from disregarding everything in the article to go on some great tangent about the AMA and artificial scarcity of doctors.

What's more, it seems that this article has triggered a reflexive anti-union stance, when it's more a hallmark of a place where capitalism does not work well. Why doesn't that hospital have more doctors? Surely, they could have found someone additional if they wanted. The hospital did not have to schedule every surgery as if they all required the average procedure time. The hospital could invest in better IT infrastructure and have software that was not a drag to use. Surely the hospital could have someone help the doctor not make 70+ calls over the course of a shift in addition to everything else they do. This blog post is not about a general scarcity of doctors; there's lots that could be done by the hospital investing in its staff and outcomes without hiring a single additional doctor.

Don't be a pain. All analogies are wrong, but they can still be illustrative