doctors - ThisIsCommonSense.org

There is a doctor shortage. Economists who study such issues project that the shortfall will continue to grow.

That is, the pool of available professionals for advanced and general practice medicine is shrinking relative to demand.

A report last year at Definitive Healthcare provides a list of reasons:

Shifts in physician and patient populations
Most healthcare workers prefer not to work in rural hospitals
Medical school and residency programs are limited
Healthcare workers are burnt out

What wasn’t mentioned? The COVID response debacle. When an elephant makes a deposit on the waiting room floor, don’t ignore it.

But, instead, the list of causes and cures was predictable: “too many administrative tasks” (need more assistants, or at least AI?); “poor work-life balance” (but that’s always been the case); “insufficient salary” (you could see that one coming a mile away, right?).

A study published in March, “The Complexities of Physician Supply and Demand: Projections From 2021 to 2036,” prepared for the Association of American Medical Colleges, dips its timid toes in that topic, but says little of significance.

And as I scrolled through a report on the study, I thought: this is none of my business. Just as it’s none of my business to fret much about the supply and demand for toilet tissue or garbage trucks. This is all supposed to be taken care of by “the market.”

Trouble is, we do not have a free market in medical care. We have an over-regulated, vastly subsidized healthcare system.

The key to the future supply of doctors is getting the government out of doctors’ business. Hesitating to turn that key, or saying that government “must do more,” merely makes the malady worse.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Did Cuba and Brazil just prove Sen. Rand Paul right … about socialism?

Eight years ago, the ophthalmologist-turned-politician raised progressive ire in a subcommittee hearing.

“With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies,” the junior senator from the state of Kentucky said. “It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.”

To many, this seemed preposterous. Doctors would be paid! They wouldn’t be forced to work.

Well, consider Brazil’s socialized medical service.

In his campaign for the presidency, Jair Bolsonaro promised to make “major changes to the Mais Médicos program, an initiative begun in 2013 when a leftist government was in power,” the New York Times explains. “The program sent doctors into Brazil’s small towns, indigenous villages and violent, low-income urban neighborhoods.”

But there was a catch: “About half of the Mais Médicos doctors were from Cuba.” Brazil paid a hefty price tag for those doctors — to the Cuban government, not the doctors.

None too pleased with Bolsonaro’s talk of “freeing” the doctors, the Communist dictatorship pulled them out.

Maybe Kentucky’s senatorial physician was right. When a government seizes the control of the means of production, as socialists want and communists demand, at some point somebody in charge will notice that labor is a means of production.

Slaves don’t set the terms of their own employment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing