theoretically, wouldn't increasing the supply of doctors have a downward pressure on wages and thus make it cheaper to employ more of them?

▲

banannaise 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, it would make it cheaper. Would that result in these companies employing more doctors to perform the same amount of care at higher quality, or would it result in them retaining the standard of care they're currently providing while taking home a larger profit margin?

▲

mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-]

There are a lot of hospitals where there is an endless supply people showing up to the ER with non-emergent stuff because it is the only place required to take them, and their number is only limited by wait time due to triage; they'll just leave if it takes too long as their life isn't threatened and they have something else to do.

You could hire a whole army of doctors and they'd still be there, word gets around. If the doctors are cheap enough to cover whatever you can get from debt collection agencies to sell off the debt they'll never pay, then you could hire a lot.

▲

rileymat2 2 days ago | parent [-]

If this is happening now, why would they cut the number of doctors?

▲

mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-]

They can't sell the debt for uninsured non-emergent case for enough money to cover the doctor.

Cutting doctors means only the most prioritized triage cases makes it to doctors, which skews towards people that are employed or on medicare and the money can be recouped, and thus improves profitability.

It's an end-run against the requirement they take in the hordes of people with no insurance who show up to the ER for low-income cases and no way to pay it.

If doctors were so cheap as to be covered by the sales to debt collectors, the whole thing gets flipped, as it would be profitable to just hire armies of them to cover the hordes who come in with non-emergent cases.

▲

rileymat2 2 days ago | parent [-]

Do we really think an increase in the supply of doctors will cause prices to collapse so hard that selling off unpaid medical debt will be profitable?

	▲	mothballed 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That depends, can we use IRS agents with guns to collect money to backstop unpaid medical debt?

▲

matheusmoreira 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It absolutely would. Source: live in a country which "democratized" access to medical schools and flooded the market with doctors. Consequences? Let's just say that the term "secondary effects" doesn't quite cover it.

This thread is talking about ERs so let's focus on that. Pay for a 12 hour shift has fallen by over 50% and that's without accounting for inflation. As a result, only heavily indebted and inexperienced doctors are manning the ERs now. These are critical life saving jobs that ought to attract the most experienced doctors but they turned into reassigned-to-Antartica tier jobs that only new or failed doctors put up with. Now factor in the substandard education provided by the hundreds of newly created medical schools which don't even have a hospital for students to practice in. The result is of course stupid and incompetent doctors manning ERs. I remember one guy who sent home a patient with textbook myocardial infarction symptoms without even ordering a routine EKG, obviously leading to the patient's death. Imagine being that dude's lawyer.

Depressing the wages of healthcare workers has fatal consequences. There's no reason at all to spend the best decade of one's life busting ass in medical school and residency if one is not gonna get rich off of it. You want your doctor to be the smartest, most studious, most hard working, most debt-free person you'll ever meet. You don't want to put your life and well-being in the hands of a stupid indebted doctor who graduated from a diploma mill.