I always find it funny that doctors never think their huge salaries are part of the problem. Doctors in other countries earn way less than doctors here. That helps keep costs lower.
I'm all for lowering the cost of higher education but I'm skeptical that would bring down the cost of healthcare. Doctors who have long since paid off their student loans don't seem to be volunteering to take lower salaries; rather the opposite.
One approach could be to expand the availability of accelerated Baccalaureate-MD programs. Those cut education time by up to two years but are currently available at only a few schools.
Except in this case, the main group of doctors (the AMA) convinced congress to cap the number of residencies available to med school graduates explicitly to prevent the “over supply of physicians”.
Yes, the AMA did that but they have since reversed their position and have been lobbying Congress to increase the number of residency slots. So far Congress hasn't acted.
It sounds like they want to increase the cap, not remove it entirely. This is, again, likely self serving. If there aren’t enough anesthesiologist, for instance, surgeons can’t perform surgery.
But, honestly, good for them. I wish other white collar ICs understood the power of banding together to lobby for your professions interests.
Hmm I guess when I see a single, unified viewpoint codified into law by the singular professional association representing the entirety of doctors in America, I don’t really think “hmm l, those doctors really have varying viewpoints on this issue.”
I’m very skeptical that there are many doctors that support removing the supply cap. Of course, many doctors understand that the supply cap increases their salaries and thus the cost of care. But that’s different from actively supporting policies that will lower their salaries.
Or you should provide some evidence? What’s your source, “trust me bro?” It’s already a well established fact that the AMA lobbied congress to impose residency quotas, a position they continue to support. Therefore, the only logical conclusion is that the (likely vast) majority of doctors support this.
And the AMA isn't the only organization representing physicians. Many of them aren't even members. It's not like a union or something.
Even today there is no legal quota limit on residencies. There's only a cap on slots funded by the federal government through Medicaid. Other organizations are free to fund as many slots as they want. If you have the means you could go to your local non-profit teaching hospital and donate money to expand their program.
You made the first unsubstantiated claim first. You've since moved onto this second less absolute statement about the AMA and I see you again pushing another unsubstantiated claim.
Original claim: doctor salaries are part of the problem.
Substantiation: Doctors in the U.S. earn way more than doctors elsewhere. It logically follows that higher salaries lead to higher healthcare costs. For reference, the average doctor in the U.S. earns over $360K. In Germany, that number is around 85K euros.
Then you claimed that some doctors think this is a problem.
I responded by saying that the AMA lobbied to artificially restrict the supply of doctors. This is a well known fact. It’s literally in the introduction (with sources) on their Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association
> the AMA has frequently lobbied to restrict the supply of physicians, contributing to a doctor shortage in the United States.[10][11][12][13] The organization has also lobbied against allowing physician assistants and other health care providers to perform basic forms of health care. The organization has historically lobbied against various forms of government-run health insurance.[8]
So all that is left unsubstantiated is your claim that “a bunch of doctors do recognize the issue.” Ok, which ones? How widespread is this belief? Why is the AMA acting against these beliefs?
Rather than cutting salaries we should expand the ability earn an MD. But expanding medical school causes shrieks of hysterical anger from doctors. Same with importing foreign doctors. My pearls
A friend of mine is an opthalmic surgeon. He does complex corneal transplants and cataract surgery etc.
He had 12 years of training before he could so his first surgery. Once he invited me to observe a couple of operations that he did, which was super interesting. He told me afterwards that smart people with steady hands could probably be trained in 3 months to do the routine surgical work.
Bartenders used to also dabble in dentistry and medical care. So much nonsense involved between someone needing care, and being able to pay someone to implement the care.
Ultimately yes, but in healthcare, demand is fixed (to a large extent) and supply is tightly controlled as the education takes super long and hospitals only have limited residencies available.
Not really. Demand for healthcare is effectively infinite. Limiting the supply of doctors is one technique that governments use to control overall healthcare system costs. If patients have to wait months for a specialist appointment or elective surgery then that means fewer claims coming in.
Generally speaking the supply and demand curves taught in Econ 101 don't apply to healthcare.
Supply and demand curves need not apply here sounds like special pleading. I think we'd get a lot further treating healthcare like every other good/service then saying it's sui generis.
It’s not helpful to think of most pain clinics as fundamentally interested in treating chronic pain. Rather, these pain clinics were an experiment with de-facto legalization of opioids for recreational use. Just like you used to be able to see certain doctors in California for a “medical” marijuana license under dubious pretenses (“I’m having trouble sleeping”), you could walk into a pain clinic and get legal opiates (“My back hurts no matter what I do”). It turns out that legalization of opiates is a disaster.
I don't understand the focus on Intel's board. Intel released a new processor back in October (Arrow Lake) and it was a total flop. That is why Pat Gelsinger was fired.
I am surprised we don’t have more YouTube influencers who are AI generated. A lot of the opinion YouTubers can likely be replaced by AI, eg take a news item and then represent their worldview and perspective as the prompt and ask for a script. Then pad it out with appropriate AI generated videos to go along with the script. You would be missing the custom graphics still, but it would be getting close.
somewhere between 20 and 40% of all short videos recommended to me have AI involved at least somewhat, and a full 10% are 100% AI, from the captions to the graphics to the audio.
Capcut has(had?) a feature to just pump this garbage out. I thought i had a video on youtube i made with capcut but apparently i have scruples and didn't even upload it privately.
One thing you could try is to get into a field that skews older. Most people don’t enter the trades until they’re in their 30s, so a 36 year old apprentice wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. From your post, it doesn’t seem like you’ll ever be cut out for knowledge work, but you didn’t really share any details so it’s hard to say.
Violence certainly can be effective, but also not. Everything is situational. See the Black Panthers vs. peaceful protesting during the civil rights movement. See also the American Revolution. Whether or not violence makes sense likely depends on how strong you and your friends are.
This is also why the state apparatus like it incite violence in the opposition, this gives them authority to respond with violence.
Nonviolent protest and organizing is more dangerous because it could quickly become a populist movement. A small group of people incited into violence, is already fringe and can be quickly suppressed.
That how we define "all" logically but not linguistically. For instance, linguistically we would consider this inconsistent: "all 10-foot men have black hair AND all 10-foot men have blonde hair" yet it is true, logically, if there are no 10-foot tall men. The translation of the English word "all" should be something something like: |Q| > 0 ∧ ∀x∈Q, x is ...
Bioengineering will obviously be a large technological force moving forward. Quick vaccine development and targeting cancer seems like the tip of the iceberg.
Technological advancement in semi-conductors has enabled human-like AI models.
We'll see if any of these show in statistics like average life spans and mortality rates.
We'll see if AI helps in productivity (e.g., per capita GDP): the book shows data that says that computers and the Internet had effects, but they were done by 2004 (book was published in 2016, and had numbers until 2014).
