People skills, pre-meds, medical students and doctors

[ucbalumnus]

@WISdad23

We have manufactured shortages of doctors. Admission rates to American medical schools are in the single digits so that even some of our brightest students fail to gain admission to medical school. Meanwhile, we import hordes of doctors from other countries whose cultures are vastly different and whose education systems are vastly different. Some of them are good, others awful.

Of course, the cost of medical school (resulting in new MDs with $300,000 in debt) and the limited number of residency slots (despite government subsidy of such) are factors that create the shortage and are unlikely to be changed by going completely free market. We import foreign-educated MDs because many of them do not have the debt levels that US-educated MDs have, so they can afford to go into lower paid specialties (e.g. the primary care ones), particularly in poorer regions.