[mullingitover]

> In USA/Canada there is cartel enforced cap on how many new doctors can be minted per year, and this cap is not even scaling up with the population growth.

This. The primary purpose of the AMA is to prevent doctors from existing and providing care, all in order to drive up their wealth and status.

Korea has a similar problem right now, their doctors just flexed their power to gain the upper hand economically[1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/09/15/nx-s1-5113082/as-medical-stri...

[matheusmoreira]

You should be very careful with this narrative. It invariably concludes that the market should be flooded with doctors. They are minted by medical schools, so naturally the mechanism to flooding the market involves opening more of them and dumbing down the graduation requirements.

I live in a country where that exact process is happening right now in real time. It's not pretty. The level of charlatanism and straight up incompetence in this country is off the charts. There are people graduating medical school right now who don't know how to diagnose a heart attack, let alone treat it. And these are the people manning the emergency services. Because wages were driven down, no doctor worth his salt is gonna accept that job. Why work in some shithole hospital when you can be a dermatologist? Emergency services turned into "reassigned to Antartica" tier jobs only failed doctors put up with. I don't even want to think about the number of people who are dying as a result of this.

[mullingitover]

> They are minted by medical schools, so naturally the mechanism to flooding the market involves opening more of them and dumbing down the graduation requirements.

Nope, in the US we have an extra filter that takes perfectly good med school grads and throws away a large fraction for no good reason other than their bad luck in not getting into a residency program. These are people who passed four years of quite rigorous medical school at great expense, and we effectively ruin their lives (and create artificial health care shortages) by denying them careers arbitrarily. In the US it doesn't matter if you're in the top 1% of the graduating class in the best medical school in the country: if you don't get into a residency program (required before you can be an MD) your medical career is over before it begins.

Even if we did nothing but guarantee a 1-1 relationship between graduates of our medical schools and residency program seats we would have more doctors and would not be watering down our talent pool of doctors one iota.

[rangestransform]

On the other hand, the medical school admissions process in Canada has become such a pissing contest between people who are extraordinarily high achieving. I don’t think the difference between someone who got a 99th percentile MCAT and a 95th percentile MCAT will ever make a difference in patient outcomes.