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programmertotetoday at 12:45 AM2 repliesview on HN

Agreed. As a spouse of a specialist doctor in the US, average folks don't include doctors when they blame the exorbitant prices of the US healthcare. Sure, big pharma, insurance companies, hospital admins and everyone in between play a part in this big profit-making machine.

But doctors (a lot of them, not all) are complicit in this healthcare complex. American Medical Association is one of the top lobbying groups in D.C. They gate-keep the production of US doctors artificially low by making the candidates go through longer years of education (4 years of college before another 4 years of med school is an overkill for most doctors) compared to other developed nations, resulting in high compensations for doctors AND longer wait-time for patients (due to doctor shortage). They also put up regulation barriers and it requires a lot of certification and exams to become a doctor, so whoever becomes a doctor has the best interest to keep the system (status quo) going.

Average US doctor gets paid a lot more than their counterparts in other developed nations.


Replies

kart23today at 7:03 AM

I agree. congress actually caps the number of residency slots, which is agreed by many to be the ultimate bottleneck for the amount of doctors produced each year. There are plenty of people willing and well-qualified to go through medical school and become a doctor.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12256077/

nradovtoday at 12:52 AM

The AMA may cause some problems but you can't reasonably blame them for this one. They are not a regulatory or accreditation body. State medical boards control provider certification. Some universities have combined BS / MD programs that cut education time down to 6 years.

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