[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.