[mentalhealth]

I'm on my way out, so this'll be quick, but a few other restrictions on supply:

* There can notionally only be as many fill-able residencies as there are graduating medical students -- this number would probably be the most easy to increase (since schools are fine with making more money), but it's actually quite difficult to find enough instructors to teach the students because the job pays so poorly compared to many other avenues a physician can take (and you need a certain instructor/student ratio for both accreditation and to attract students).

* Each residency program can only admit as many students as they are licensed to do, and this licensing generally is tied to the program volume (so a program seeing X patients per year would be granted Y residency spots). This gets tied to the professional organizations for the individual specialties (an oversimplification), who actually have an incentive to restrict the number of residency spots in order to maintain their own job security.

* There are plenty of available residency spots in the fields we need most, such as primary care -- it's just that unless people feel particularly compelled, they don't go into those specialties, because compensation and work/life balance are so poor compared to many specializations.

[sukilot]

? Primary care is the easiest work-life balance outside of radiology. 0 stress 28-hr weeks.

[ceejayoz]

Zero stress? 28 hour weeks? Where are you getting this from?

http://medicaleconomics.modernmedicine.com/medical-economics...

> Median hours per week remained unchanged from 2011 to 2012 for family/general practitioners at 50 hours, though visits per week increased slightly from 98 in 2011 to 99 in 2012.