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Revealed preferences in the real world: black doctors.
I wonder if anyone has studied this? What is going to happen to all the black doctors who are being admitted to med school with inferior credentials and who will likely be socially promoted through residency/licensing as well.
I'm sure a large degree of affirmative action has already affected the supply of doctors, but the post-Great Awokening world seems to have taken that to a new level. Apparently rates of test-failing have increased by nearly 10x in some subjects at UCLA's medical school post 2020.
https://x.com/aaronsibarium/status/1793657774767022569
This is obviously forbidden information. I wonder how many schools will simply cover it up and graduate people as normal despite failures.
I hate to say it, but if I or a loved one was seriously ill, I would try my best to get a non-black doctor. If I wanted the best, I'd probably follow Peter Griffin's advice. I imagine others have similar revealed preferences that we would never admit in public. In the future, will black doctors magically have tons of open appointments while the cue to see Dr. Rosenblatt grows ever longer? I think probably.
It's irrelevant because no one actually cares about their doctor's academic credentials. Maybe fail rates are higher at UCLA but UCLA is hard to get into to begin with, so I imagine the coursework is harder than at a place like NEOMED. And there are already schools of osteopathy that seem to attract people who couldn't get into MD programs. I'd be willing to bet that if I were to take a random poll few people would be able to tell me where their doctor even went to med school let alone how highly that school is regarded or what their grades were. Like almost everything else, once you get your first job your education is pretty much irrelevant.
I'm not elite enough in any respect to really merit an elite doctor. I go to the doctors' office nearest my house. My doctor is a nice Indian lady. Maybe she's good, maybe she's not, who knows.
I encourage this attitude, it's extremely hard to know if your doctor is good or not because the things that are available for a patient to know are generally customer service things that are often extremely uncoupled from actual medical knowledge and practice ability. Very common for people with good customer service skills to be bad doctors.
Unless having bad customer service correlates with being a good doctor (House was right?) then it seems like it would still make sense to search for one with good reviews.
I would wager that all things equal the more acerbic personality will have higher skills (otherwise how to compete?)
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It does, it's very common for patients to ask for things they don't need or for things that may be bad for them (classic examples are controlled substances and antibiotics). People don't like being told things like "just wait out the infection, it is viral" or "well I know you are in pain, but actually the narcotics are bad for you." People who just prescribe like crazy get better reviews.
Inpatient things can be a bit more different, but those encounters don't generally result in reviews.
And that's not counting things like psychiatry where a good psychiatrist is always going to get angry reviews from certain classes of patients.
The classic example that comes to mind here is "Have you tried eating healthier, getting more exercise, and losing weight?"
"Your diabetes is so advanced your limbs are falling off." "Stop fat shaming me."
You are taking that cartoon out of context. It isn't saying that the patrient's arm fell off because of diabetes. It's showing the patient complaining about one thing, and the doctor telling him routine boilerplate about losing weight that has nothing whatsoever to do with the patient's problem. The patient is not ignoring the doctor's advice about weight, the doctor is ignoring the patient's complaint by mentioning weight.
Note that the cartoon nowhere says "diabetes" or "fat shaming".
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"I came for my Vicodin for my joint pain, not to be fat-shamed, you sexist pig!"
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