Have medical schools been keeping the number of students limited to artificially inflate the income of doctors?
asked:
Plenty of students who should be able to attend medical school are not allowed to because medical schools only admit a small number of students every year. Why do they not expand? The number of new doctors has remained pretty constant throughout the years.
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Plenty of students who should be able to attend medical school are not allowed to because medical schools only admit a small number of students every year. Why do they not expand? The number of new doctors has remained pretty constant throughout the years.
April 20th, 2010 at 1:49 am
yes, I know this for fact. Bad Elephant; back in your cave!
April 22nd, 2010 at 4:54 am
Why shouldnt doctors make alot of money.??? I dont want a low paid dope operating on me
Didn’t this country used to be a meritocracy. Libs want it to be a country of mediocracy downwithsocialists
April 25th, 2010 at 6:14 am
Who said the number of doctors has remained constant? How do you know that?
The fact is that too many people are not intelligent enough to become a doctor. ME
April 27th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Medical schools require cooperation from so-called teaching hospitals, and the number who can pass through the system is hard to change significantly in a short period of time. The number of applicants has been shrinking in recent years, as physicans lose freedoms and become little more than paper shufflers controlled by the government and insurance carriers. Shovel Ready
April 30th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
From what I have heard, yes, that is the case. That is why there are American students in Cuban med schools and also that tiney little country that Reagan invaded, that is a big time medical school country for American kids. That is why the pre med kids at major university are the most obnoxious about trying to get their grades raised by whatever means necessary, for a beter gpa on their med school applications.
These poor little doctors so afraid of national health care are protecting their own income levels by limiting the competition. Oh yeah. ash
May 1st, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Yes. Dentists as well. Nacho Mamas
May 1st, 2010 at 10:32 pm
Your right, they should let any moron into Medical School.. Don’t you want your doc to be in the top 5% of college graduates? Eric P
May 5th, 2010 at 6:45 am
No, there are actually federal mandates that limit the number of doctors. Just another way the federal government has ruined what was once the greatest health-care system in the world. Casey P
May 8th, 2010 at 8:51 am
Yes. volleyballchick (cowards block)
May 9th, 2010 at 7:00 am
Yes. But I don’t think this is a conspiracy among the Medical Schools to reduce capacity and there is no shortage of qualified applicants. The cost of educating them is just very high, especially since professors salaries need to keep up with their peers.
The number of new doctors has not remained constant. From 1980-1990 the number of doctors increased by 36% while the population increased by 10%. From 1990-2000 doctors increased by 19% as opposed to total employment of 12%. Currently there is one doctor for every 300 Americans. But the number of primary care physicians has dropped to one in 3000.
The AMA, teaching hospitals, and licensing authorities do deliberately restrict the supply of doctors. The cost of malpractice insurance also deters people from becoming doctors and causes them to restrict their clientele and to specialize.
In many countries, there are so many primary care doctors, that they don’t earn much more than the average person. They also have different classes of doctors so being a specialist means something special, not just that you are selective in who you want to treat.
If the government wanted to increase the number of doctors and reduce the costs, they could offer subsidies to the schools for increasing capacity, and increase scholarships and loan assistance. Over the long-run this would have more impact than insurance subsidies. brucec83
May 10th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
Of course this will not be a concern anymore…because if the health care bill passes…people will not go into the medical profession…they will go into other areas…why? Because the schooling is so expensive and it takes a long time to pay back those loans….who wants to work in a field that the government sets how much a person can earn… blue317
May 10th, 2010 at 9:15 pm
I’m interested in your statement “The number of new doctors has remained pretty constant throughout the years”. Is that a statistical fact, or just your opinion? Can you link to an almanac or census data that supports that, or perhaps something from the Bureau of Labor Statistics? I looked briefly but couldn’t find anything that made a comparison “throughout the years”.
There are many, many reasons that a school - any school, not just a medical school - would not expand. Class size is one of them - as classes get larger, the quality of education is reduced because students do not get as much if any individual attention. The biggest reason, though, is probably money - medical schools (and most schools) cannot survive on tuition dollars alone - they rely heavily on endowments - donations from alumni, from foundations, from corporations and on state and federal funding.
Running a school is running a business - you must be able to make a profit so that you can invest in the latest equipment, in quality faculty, to develop state-of-the art facilities.
Your question is a little paranoid; not everything is a conspiracy to make other people rich. DavidH
May 13th, 2010 at 3:59 am
You are absolutely correct! The AMA has been keeping the number of potential new doctors way below the optimum since its founding, as a way to boost the incomes of its members. Think of the AMA as the ultimately powerful labor union, but one that has life-or-death powers over the whole country. If you are a member of the UAW or the SEIU, you don’t have the power of life or death over your neighbors or members of your community, but if you are a member of the AMA, you can restrict the number of new doctors down to such a small number that is would be laughable. This is exactly why half of all the doctors you now see in American hospitals and clinics are foreign-born and foreign-trained. It’s this way because this is the way the AMA wants it. correrafan