[barry-cotter]

US medical education is provably inefficient. You can take a sufficiently intelligent 17 year old and give them a top notch medical education in five years. In Ireland and the UK Medicine is an undergraduate degree and takes five or six years depending on the university. If you got rid of summers off you could do it very comfortably in four. Making medicine a second entry degree is a giant waste of social resources.

[dinkumthinkum]

Wait, I thought the college was irrelevant? Why can't the brilliant 17 year old just read blog posts or whatever people who propose these positions think?

Anyway, I'm going to address a different issue. ... You really think you take a 17 year old straight out of high school level education and in four years they are a medical doctor? That's interesting ...

[barry-cotter]

As much as someone just out of med school, yes. At an absolute bare minimum you still need to do your internship for a year before you can practice.

On your first point; most people don't use most of what they learn in college once they leave it. This is substantially less true of medicine than many other fields. At the same time most doctors do a pretty thorough job of forgetting math and physics and a reasonable job of forgetting chemistry.