How about if the AMA decided to allow easier access to immigrant doctors trained in other countries? That would vastly increase the supply ( as American doctors are much, much more highly paid than most other doctors). And some spiel about foreign doctors being inferior is nonsensical. But the AMA would oppose such measures tooth and nail.

I really feel this rant does not give the entire picture. This country is turning out 23,000 to 24,000 new MDs every year (that is because we have 15-16K US graduates and 7-8K foreign medical graduates entering medical residency programs in the US each year). The vast majority of foreign medical graduates remain in this country to practice medicine after residency by taking advantage of the different visa waiver programs. Usually these foreign medical graduates from countries such as Russia, France, India, etc. have little or no medical education debt and are thus in a better position to enter a US physician job market where salaries continue to erode severely, particularly when compared with increases in the cost of living. Why sentence more US grads to the US medical education debt nightmare, particularly when they may end up facing the nightmare of possible default on their loans due to the current physician job marketplace? If there is really a shortage, we might just increase the entry of FMG’s into residency programs from 7-8K per year to 11-12K per year or even higher. In Great Britain from what I understand, more than 50 percent of the MDs are foreign born and I see no reason why this will not occur in the US as well as we march toward socialized medicine.

db,

What Greg said and what you said as well. The fact that physicians can control their hours suggests that there is a shortage — they have great pricing power and control of their work environment, as well as hours.

I have a friend who was a nurse anesthetist and she simply told the hospital that she wanted to work four days a week and they had little choice but to meet her demands. Physicians are probably similarly situated.

This does bring up another issue: moving work from more expensive doctors to highly qualified technicians and nurses. It seems to me that there’s much to be gained there, though there’s a shortage of nurses right now as well.

Well, to the first, and anonymous, poster, I certainly hope that the AMA would oppose a strategy of flooding the U.S. with foreign-trained doctors. And I hope the collective establishment of universities with medical faculties and anyone else concerned with the survival of an American system of medical education would also oppose such a reckless and shortsighted idea. It might seem convenient to fob off the costs of educating the future doctors of America on the good citizens of India, Argentina, Russia, Poland, South Africa and other countries (and they do produce good graduates, I have no argument with you there) but it would come at a price of undermining our own university training institutions while at the same time robbing those countries of their valuable human capital.