Less than 20 years—what is 20 to you? That's a generation's worth of time to live, love, have grandchildren; enjoy retirement. People of that age with Covid-19 are often nowhere near the point where hospice is recommended. Would you expect the treatment you prescribe?

In any case, we're seeing a surge in cases where the young are facing hospitalizations https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/health/covid-children-hos.... When I trained at a country hospital, it was overwhelmingly people under 50 being hospitalized for COVID-19. Children are at risk and we shouldn't think like it's spring of 2020 anymore.

This.

Adults have offloaded as much of the burden of the pandemic on young people as possible.

- Suicide rates are through the roof

- Developmentally delays

- Societal debt

And it goes on. Medical professional have it rough… oh well! Open up more medical schools, theres far more people willing to go to med school than get in.

Id rather not go to the Dr. and not need prescriptions to buy most drugs. Lets loosen those regulations and 80% of the reasons Ive been to the Dr. in the last six years will be covered with the same formula: 10 days of augmentin.

You can't open up more medical schools because the American Medical Association has lobbied for decades and use their accreditation authority to put a cap on the number of seats in med schools in the US. There's been virtually no change since the 1980s despite a 30% increase in the population.

They are perhaps one of the most significant drags on economic growth in the history of the United States. Because of the artificially induced scarcity, we pay mediocre physicians the wages that CEOs earn in other industries.

Everyone in the US thinks insurance companies are to blame, while they are certainly not efficient, there have been numerous studies that show that the majority of growth in price increases in medicine are due to physician wages and their organized bargaining power with insurance companies driving up prices.

What other service have you encountered where you routinely have the person you are paying reschedule your appointments at the last minute? Thanks to the American Medical Association, they have the ability to do this with impunity. What's insane is we actually have to import medical workers from overseas where they are trained in countries that don't have an evil organization limiting supply.

Knowing about this has made it even more unbearable to get scolded by these people for 2 years. I'm terribly sorry that they have to endure such horrible conditions while earning over $400,000 a year. It really is primarily a profession of non-creative, rule following mid-wits, kissing the ass of their licensing boards and taking defacto bribes from pharma reps to push the latest overprescribed Big Pharma product.

“ You can't open up more medical schools because the American Medical Association has lobbied for decades and use their accreditation authority to put a cap on the number of seats in med schools in the US. ”

Thats what I was implying, but I wasn’t sure if this was also the case in the US as in other countries. Like you say, its their doing so they can go and cry me a river for all I care.

That's not correct. The actual bottleneck in training more physicians is lack of federal funding for residency slots. Every year about 5% of the students who graduate from accredited medical schools fail to get matched to a residency program and are thus unable to practice medicine. Contrary to your claim, the American Medical Association has actually been lobbying for increased residency funding for years, and even contributed their own money.

https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-fun...

Why does the federal government need to fund the training of doctors? They don't fund the training of software engineers considering that universities do a pretty poor job of preparing somebody for a position at a software company. The vast majority of computer science graduates I've hired require extensive on the job training before I can trust them with anything. I've actually had to fire several.

If you're talking about clinics catering to poor populations. Why can't they use their Medicare money?

I'm sorry, I don't trust anything from the AMA because they are a lobbying organization. Why don't I just start sending links to the American Petroleum Institute while we're at it?

The federal government doesn't necessarily need to fund the residency training of doctors, but if we want more doctors then that's the fastest way to get them. Most teaching hospitals are non-profits so if they had to self fund residency programs then they would have to raise prices to patients. Hospitals barely break even (or less) on many Medicare service fees so those don't provide much margin to fund residency programs. That is the reality of our situation regardless of whether you trust the AMA.

Yes the American Petroleum Institute is a good source of information on some topics. They're certainly biased and I disagree with some of their conclusions, but they publish some accurate data and it's worth understanding their perspective.

> This isn't just anecdotal, there are studies showing small children are TWO STANDARD DEVIATIONS behind where they should be.

Do you have a link? I would not be surprised if there were significant developmental issues, but two standard deviations is such an enormously large effect size that I'm doubtful.