alt Hacker News> We simply do not have enough doctors
We're going to need to make more doctors. To do that we'll need to identify kids in high school that would be good candidates and offer full-ride scholarships where needed. And we need to improve science education at the high school level to help with all of this.
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Or, like, not haze kids in their 20s for residency and make them take hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Whereas in Europe and other countries, residents work something like 50 hours per week and graduate with zero debt.
I've watched friends go through it here in the US and I have zero interest in working 24 hour shifts and sleeping in break rooms, working 80+ hour weeks for years. There just is no need other than hazing and keeping artificial scarcity of doctors for inflated wages. There are plenty of brilliant, scientifically minded, hard working people that care about others that probably could be great doctors, but the US training system is just hostile towards most people.
> To do that we'll need to identify kids in high school that would be good candidates and offer full-ride scholarships where needed. And we need to improve science education at the high school level to help with all of this.
We could import them.
We have tons of options. But the medical industry likes a shortage, because they like high wages, so I won't hold my breath.
They pick the rules. The rules favor them.
That's going to remain true for the foreseeable future, and on the list of problems, that's at the absolute bottom of things to fix that would actually move the needle.
The cost you spend on DIRECT HEALTHCARE is only ~20-30% of all spending. The rest is administration, drugs, insurance overhead, profits, ACTUAL insurance costs, cost overruns due to insurance making everything as expensive as possible to scrape 15% off the top, fraud, legal fees, etc.
The biggest benefit to moving to a centralized insurer is that fraud is centralized.
If you're a Republican and skeptical of government, you might assume the government will let massive fraud slip through to insiders, and you don't like that.
If you're a Democrat, and think the government can generally be good, you think the government can catch a lot of the fraud and cut total costs by 10% to get to fraud levels that are similar to other advanced countries (with similar systems).