Wed 4 Nov 2009
Rooftops + Megaphones
Posted by Brian Moore under healthcare
[2] Comments
Yell louder, Mr. Fisher. The craziest part:
The federal government effectively controls the number of residency positions through the Medicare program, which pays a subsidy of $8.8 billion to hospital training programs. In 1997 Congress determined the country had enough doctors and capped the number of slots it would pay for at around 98,000.
Yup. Too many doctors! That’s Congress for you.
He does miss one point in his byline question of “why is it so hard to get primary care physicians through residency programs?” A major factor is “because their residency programs are so grueling.” He gets the specialist pay issue, but lifestyle is becoming an even larger determinant, I think.
Consider your wacko libertarian logic here. Too few doctors are government’s fault, because it doesn’t subsidize them enough! Brilliant.
I think it’s pretty standard economics, even for non-libertarians, to say that subsidizing the first 98k creates a huge marginal difference in hiring the 98,001th doctor.
While like all libertarians, I would like to see the government involved less in medicine, there’s no current plans to get them out of the business of regulating how many doctors are created, plus the entire thing is so tangled up that it would take more than just the simple libertarian “cut the medicare subsidy to residency programs” remedy.
So if I titled the post “how to reorganize medicine so as to remove stupid incentives like this” then your critique would be valid. As it is, this isn’t really a libertarian point: I recognize that congress is going to be regulating this — I just wish they would do a better job, and I’ll continue to criticize them when they make a completely backwards decision like “let’s reduce the number of doctors” in a time when we will need drastically larger numbers of them.