> Something I've never quite understood is why, in the UK, we cap the number of medical students per year.
To keep salaries high.
I'm brazilian. In recent years, brazilian medical schools have been "democratized", so to speak. The number of medical schools has exploded and acceptance of doctors from neighboring south american countries has been facilitated. About 50 thousand new doctors enter the market every year.
Result? Pathetic salaries. Actual unemployment. Doctors fighting each other over the shittiest jobs with the worst working conditions. Doctors becoming Uber drivers. Complete loss of the prestige the profession once enjoyed. Rampant charlatanism and unethical conduct. Badly educated doctors who kill their patients. Dishonest doctors promising miracle cures on Instagram because that's what gets them engagement and therefore patients.
There is no reason whatsoever to become a doctor under these conditions. Too much responsibility, too little reward. You're better off doing literally anything else.
Society needs to carefully consider the needs of those who will be responsible for other people's lives. When responsibility does not equal reward, it's pointless. My society chose to treat those people with absolute contempt. The results are plain to see.
Thanks for contributing that point. It’s good to have one data point for what happens when there are no restrictions.
I’m from Ireland and have the same experience as most of the rest of the commentators on this thread, i.e., we have a chronic shortage of doctors – and nurses – in our health system. This has been the case for as long as I’ve been alive but it’s got much worse in the last decade or so.
It’s interesting to see how universal this problem is – aside from the odd country like Brazil where the pendulum seems to have swung too far in the opposite direction. It’d be nice to know if any country has found a happy medium.
> we have a chronic shortage of doctors – and nurses – in our health system
Just imagine how bad it's going to be once the "you're set for life if you go to medical school" meme dies. It's still very much alive here in Brazil but people are already being forcibly woken up to face reality before they've even graduated. Won't be long before the new generation of students realizes that medical school is a bad choice.
The bitter truth is nobody is really going to put the "care" in health care if they're not getting paid ridiculous sums of money for it. Would you really want to slave your life away in some hospital for shitty pay? I mean that literally, medical residency is analogous to indentured servitude. Would you want to spend the best decade of your youth studying and training and working 14 hours a day only to end up poor? I've seen doctors actually kill themselves over lesser failures than that.
Very few people are that selfless and altruistic, even those who affect such a demeanor in public are likely secretly hoping it will come back to them in some way in the future. They will be bitterly disappointed when it doesn't. Even fewer are rich enough that they can sustain such caring activities out of love. Those who try discover that they are just individuals, that they don't scale, they don't form a health care system. They don't make much difference in the grand scheme of things.
Today I saw an interesting post from an older doctor. He just straight up quit medicine. Took his money, bought a bunch of trucks and now he's managing a logistics company and making several times as much money as he used to while caring for people. This is an older doctor who reaped the profits of the golden age, he had the capital to create his business. New doctors arrive at the market with 100kUSD+ debt only to find that they get paid about 10 dollars a consult if they're lucky. The only winners here are the owners of the medical schools.
This just goes to show yet again that healthcare and markets are largely incompatible if you want to have good outcomes and ethical treatment of people.
To keep salaries high.
I'm brazilian. In recent years, brazilian medical schools have been "democratized", so to speak. The number of medical schools has exploded and acceptance of doctors from neighboring south american countries has been facilitated. About 50 thousand new doctors enter the market every year.
Result? Pathetic salaries. Actual unemployment. Doctors fighting each other over the shittiest jobs with the worst working conditions. Doctors becoming Uber drivers. Complete loss of the prestige the profession once enjoyed. Rampant charlatanism and unethical conduct. Badly educated doctors who kill their patients. Dishonest doctors promising miracle cures on Instagram because that's what gets them engagement and therefore patients.
There is no reason whatsoever to become a doctor under these conditions. Too much responsibility, too little reward. You're better off doing literally anything else.
Society needs to carefully consider the needs of those who will be responsible for other people's lives. When responsibility does not equal reward, it's pointless. My society chose to treat those people with absolute contempt. The results are plain to see.