Why is the AMA controlling how many medical schools are graduating doctors and how many medical schools are being built? (Corporate Profits, Congress)

[Versatile]

SoCalCroozer stated this in the thread:

Why is the AMA controlling how many medical schools are graduating doctors and how many medical schools are being built?

//www.city-data.com/forum/polit...re-reform.html

I had never heard about the AMA doing this. Can anyone expand on it?

Went and got my own answers.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/...shortage_x.htm

Congress controls the supply of physicians by how much federal funding it provides for medical residencies — the graduate training required of all doctors.

To become a physician, students spend four years in medical school. Graduates then spend three to seven years training as residents, usually treating patients under supervision at a hospital. Residents work long hours for $35,000 to $50,000 a year. Even doctors trained in other countries must serve medical residencies in the USA to practice here.

Medicare, which provides health care to the nation's seniors, also is the primary federal agency that controls the supply of doctors. It reimburses hospitals for the cost of training medical residents.

[florida.bob]

Control the supply of Doctors = control the compensation for services. Not much more complicated than that.

[SoCalCroozer]

The AMA is a HUGE and powerful lobbying organization even though the number of doctors belonging to it continues to decrease. It's a Rockefeller organization and nothing but a dressed up labor union. The entire medical profession is artificially inflated as far as demand and compensation. Medicine is the "golden child" and completely anti-thetical to free market principles. We could be graduating twice as many doctors in this country and building twice as many medical schools/colleges. We have the need and the students. Quality does not have to suffer. The only thing that would suffer is physician compensation and the fact that doctors would have to become a lot more competitive to attract and keep patients AND MAKE MONEY! That is how all professions work. If you're good at your job you make money, if you're not you lose customers and you don't. None of this I have to wait weeks to see my doctor and months to see a specialist, and even if they are jerks or I don't like them I have no other choices. Competition eliminates all that. But we also need our healthcare to be much more portable. It's ridiculous that EVERY SINGLE healthcare organization especially hospitals are not FULLY electronic and computerized. The fact we have hospitals, acute care facilities, STILL in this day and age using paper charts and physcians and nurses having to hand write orders etc. is pathetic and speaks to the inefficiency that is medicine. The amount of paperwork that goes on in healthcare is a complete and utter waste of resources. And 50% of the papework could be eliminated if government got out of the way of medicine. They as usual are **** poor at doing anything efficiently, and it's nowhere more apparent than in healthcare.

The fact that the US government blackmails hospitals by taking away medicare dollars if they don't cow tow to government bureaucracy like JCAHO etc. is tyrannical and further hampers efficient, patient driven healthcare. Hospitals should be like any other place of business. If it's dirty, dangerous, and malfunctioning people don't go there and they get shut down for lack of profit. Plain and simple. We have created a nanny state of healthcare in this country where there is absolutely zero accountability for healthcare consumers and providers.

[SoCalCroozer]

And this notion that hospitals cannot "practice medicine" therefore doctors are most often times contract employees further hinders the ability to provide efficient healthcare and hold the profession of medicine accountable i.e. doctors.

[whogo]

Eliminate the Kefauver Amendment and licensing requirements for healthcare providers and our healthcare crisis is over.

[hawkeye2009]

Originally Posted by Versatile

SoCalCroozer stated this in the thread:

Why is the AMA controlling how many medical schools are graduating doctors and how many medical schools are being built?

//www.city-data.com/forum/polit...re-reform.html

I had never heard about the AMA doing this. Can anyone expand on it?

Went and got my own answers.

USATODAY.com - Medical miscalculation creates doctor shortage

Congress controls the supply of physicians by how much federal funding it provides for medical residencies — the graduate training required of all doctors.

To become a physician, students spend four years in medical school. Graduates then spend three to seven years training as residents, usually treating patients under supervision at a hospital. Residents work long hours for $35,000 to $50,000 a year. Even doctors trained in other countries must serve medical residencies in the USA to practice here.

Medicare, which provides health care to the nation's seniors, also is the primary federal agency that controls the supply of doctors. It reimburses hospitals for the cost of training medical residents.

Oh My God!!!!!!!!

Here we go again.Thank you "Versatile" for pointing out the lunacy of the original post.

THE AMA DOES NOT DICTATE MEDICAL SCHOOL OR RESIDENCY SLOTS. IT IS A POLITICAL ORGANIZATION ONLY THAT HAS MOSTLY LEFT LEANING PRIMARY CARE DOCS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MOST physicians are not AMA members, as they consider it to be a leftist political organization.


PS- SoCal- you are obviously not in healthcare, as you know nothing about how medical school and residency slots are determined. Further EMR (electronic medical records- which our clinic has had for five years) is a DISASTER. It worsens efficiency, increases costs and medical errors. Apparently you did not read last weeks New England Journal of Medicine. If you don't know what you are talking about, perhaps you should say nothing.

[NormalCarpetRide]

Here's some thoughts about it:

The Myth of Free-Market Healthcare - Kel Kelly - Mises Daily

[Katarina Witt]

Originally Posted by whogo

Eliminate the Kefauver Amendment and licensing requirements for healthcare providers and our healthcare crisis is over.

Oh, THERE you go! Let's go back to the days when any snake-oil salesman could be a doctor!

[GregW]

IMHO - the entire system should be nationalized from the schools to elderly care facilites. Just eliminating executice bonuses, corporate profits and administrative overhead would reduce costs by billions.

[hawkeye2009]

Originally Posted by whogo

Eliminate the Kefauver Amendment and licensing requirements for healthcare providers and our healthcare crisis is over.

brilliant

Let's let people who have no clue mutilate the public. I guess you did not know why Johns Hopkins initiated the purge of quackery in the early 1900s.

I cannot believe that anyone with an ounce of sense would promote this. It would be analagous to having pilots with no training flying jet airliners, but more deadly than that. Such a proposal, beyond being idiocy, would benefit the trial lawyer's association with a flood of malpractice cases. Keep in mind that even physicians with good training make mistakes. Can you imagine what would happen to marginally intelligent people with no training making life and death decisions?

WOW