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We're no stranger to the immigration hot button here; we all want some way to filter for attractive women and investment dollars where we live and less competition for labor, but the want for those things proves weaker than the iron laws of supply and demand for both. However, here's a problem in the immigration debate that I don't think has come up in discussion before: ladies and gentlemen and undecideds of the Motte: how do we fix the doctor shortage?
And I mean globally. The solution many places settled on after it became clear that it was difficult to impossible to train more doctors locally is to import them, but this simply moves the problem around and causes brain drain as market efficiencies mean doctors move where they can get paid more.
Accounting for inflation, apparently physician pay growth is lagging although I'm not sure if anyone has more up to date information on whether this is still the case.
The easy low effort swipe is to make it easier to qualify as a doctor, but doing so without lowering medical standards and/or quality of care seems more difficult. There's also the simple calculus where people are less willing to take on, in the US, large amounts of student debt and to commit to the many years of study it takes to become a qualified doctor. After which you can look forward to high stress, long hours, dealing with patients, and potential lawsuits. It's no surprise that people would rather hustle sneakers or crypto or streaming when the effort to do so is significantly less.
Previously, governments would subsidize medical training as they saw medical professionals as a necessary function. Now, why bother? If there are opportunities and more money to be made elsewhere, they'd just move elsewhere after being trained, which would be happy to take them. Is there a low effort politically achievable band-aid fix, like making mandatory provision of medical care within the country a necessary precondition of qualification? But that'd make the profession even less popular - if you're a Kenyan doctor, fuck staying in Kenya if you can get paid multiples of that elsewhere.
Disclaimer: I'm asking for entirely selfish reasons. Working on a new investment thesis after the last one turned out spot on although with limited rewards so far for being right. I foresee this problem getting much, much worse as doctors retire, populations trend upwards in age and require increased medical care.
There may be a doctor shortage, but there is no shortage of medical knowledge. All you are seeing is the artificial scarcity of the medical cartel, which restricts the credentialing institutions to enforce a shortage, increasing wages for credentialed doctors. This, however, is a dying model. My three-step solution:
1: Reducing the time, cost and eliminating the corrupt bottleneck of medical school. Break the AMA, streamline and prune the academic curricula, and Bob's your uncle.
2: AI. Current chatbots are probably medically superior in diagnosis to the average doctor available to the average american. This will only improve. The vast majority of doctor visits could probably be a pic uploaded to an app on your phone, with results in minutes and your prescription auto-ordered.
3: Crush the inevitable revolt of the doctors and all their stakeholders.
I have spent literally years here replying every time explaining that this is not how the doctor shortage works and this is not how the AMA works and that this information is easily discoverable. At this point it's embarrassing.
I guess I will now also have to explain that that is also not how AI in medicine will work and not how medicine works.
Edit: saw the post below. Thanks
A summary or link would help.
The general understanding is that supply for doctors is artificially constrained. The bottleneck maybe residencies, credentialing bodies or just cost of entry.....but they're artificial barrier regardless.
For starters.
At this point, anyone who thinks AI can't disrupt knowledge work has their head in the sand. It may still work out, given the strength of the cartel. But that'd be a case of deliberate sabotage, not inadequacy on part of the AI.
Let me add a little bit -
The constraint is fundamentally ensuring adequate training quality, you'll see people here saying that isn't necessary and maybe they believe it but shit that doesn't seem wise.
People with more knowledge than anyone here (including me) have been working this problem for a long time, the approach is two fold - yes they have been increasing the number of medical schools and residency slots, maybe not as much as required but they are trying. Every year a large tranche of students doesn't advance to the next level of training. We have room to optimize this and interest in doing so.
The other piece has been an explosions in mid-levels, they suck frankly, and have expanded beyond the intended use case while in some ways making the issue worst by overusing specialists. If a US doc wants to retrain to cardiology they need like 2-5 years training. A midlevel needs zero. Guess who makes a better cardiologist?
In most cases the issues are things like allocation problems (which mid levels don't fix, they don't want Gainesville either), a decline in work done by physicians (increasing administration burden, malpractice, and decline in compensation and people work less), a decrease in years worked (turns out women drop out more and faster) and other complicated things like that.
Stealing doctors from other countries is a popular solution and it has some ethical and practical problems (prior to recent political changes everyone wanted to come here, we cant steal from everybody! Additionally if you import enough to depress the wages the reason for coming dies off). However they do seriously need retraining, I don't have access to the private stats but best I can tell the two most common causes of residency termination are intractable substance use and terminal inability to survey the mandatory retraining.
With respect to AI, you can't rubber stamp every case needs actual review to make sure you aren't missing something or you'll be using the doctor as a liability sponge.
AI will come eventually but it isn't ready yet.
AI can't solve procedural work (that's robotics), inpatient work is as much coordination and other soft skills as medical knowledge, and outpatient work has a lot of social components (including the usual things, but also stuff like realizing what the patient means and says are different things).
AI is not ready for that level of ambiguity. It also can't be sued, which the American patient demands.
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