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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.
The profession has a deliberately bottlenecked profession that makes it unnecessarily selective. Even if the average black doctor has lower MCATs than other doctors, they're still going to be plenty good to do basic medical procedures. I suppose part of the reason that I think this is that I generally think big chunks of medicine are significantly overrated, with only a few classes of medicine being consistently effective, and those not generally be all that hard to do. Antibiotics and vaccines work great, but they don't really take a genius to prescribe. Trauma surgery is very effective, but you're probably not going to have much time to pick who you want to fix your shattered body when you're brought in from a car accident. Without considering race, I just generally don't think I'm going to get much out of a physician with a higher MCAT.
There are a couple areas where I would want to get the absolute best. If I had cancer, I would want top-notch pathologists and oncologists working on the problem and would seek out an elite hospital. I probably wouldn't care about race in that context because the bar for being specialists working on bone marrow transplants at MD Anderson is pretty damned high. On the opposite end, if I had something that required sports medicine, I would be insistent on people that are actually knowledgeable int he field, but on this one, the intellect level shouldn't be much of a barrier.
Relatedly, I can't believe how many people that have nothing wrong with them just go to the doctor all the time for checkups, as though a physical is going to provide you any useful information about yourself. What a silly, shamanistic ritual. I'm especially amazed that people who pretty obviously don't care much about their health go through the debasement of being told annually that yep, you're still fat and should lose weight.
I'm with you in general. Americans overconsume health care to a ridiculous degree. I pretty much never see the doctor, just as I don't take my car into the dealership for a "routine checkup".
The reasons for the increase in life expectancy from 1900–present have little to do with doctors, and everything to do with public sanitation and vaccines.
But still, when I do access medical care, I can pretty easily tell the difference between the doctors who are quite intelligent and the midwits who also populate the field. The bar to cross is not THAT high, and medical errors kill untold numbers each year. Diagnosis in particular is not always easy and I don't think there's a skill ceiling. A higher IQ is always going to be better.
Americans have a lower life expanctancy than Costa Ricans, Thai people and Chileans. The US and China have roughly the same life expectancy. There are two scenarios: Americans live incredibly unhealthy lives and require 17% of GDP to be spent on health care to keep a decent middle income life expectancy or Americans live some worse than other countries and have somewhat better medical care yet get minimal bang for the buck.
We do. We’re rapidly approaching 50% obesity. We eat like crap and don’t exercise and that by itself I think lowers life expectancy by at least a decade. Add in stress and it’s like nobody should be shocked by the American life expectancy. It’s like asking why the car where you never change the oil needs more repairs than the one that gets regular maintenance.
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