mentalhealth

   The rest of us have to compete in a free market for our skills. Why not doctors?

Most doctors already come from wealthy families (specifically, they have doctor parents) because in addition to the tuition of medical school, there are a variety of other expenses (board examination fees, the undergraduate requirement, interview expenses for both medical school and residency) that are difficult to fund without assistance. Also, compensation for physicians is not what you seem to think it is outside of subspecialized fields, and the expense of medical school (and the opportunity cost of residency) means that physician shortages in the general disciplines will only continue to get worse as medical students realize the only way they can pay back their loans is to subspecialize.

Also, medical schools are primarily limited by number of faculty, and it's difficult to find doctors for med school faculty roles... because they're so poorly compensated in comparison to other opportunities.

If you want more doctors, first provide incentives for doctors to teach, then provide funding for those who normally don't see medical school as an available opportunity, then incentivize people to go into general disciplines, then properly compensate residents so they're not throwing away ten years of potential income, then complain about how "doctors are overpaid but there's also a big shortage of them".

Sure, on a car that's running that you can't turn off, with parts you can't replace, a maintenance history you can't see, and an ECU that actively misrepresents what's going on.

A hopefully not-too-inaccurate analogy might be if you heard a strange sound while driving your car, and took it into your mechanic, whose shop gets paid more the more tests they do and the more labor they put into fixing your potential non-problem, and they're potentially liable if anything later goes wrong that could be traced to that sound. Think about where the systemic incentives lie.

Given the conflict of interest in this article, I'd say that's the least of what the authors should be accused of.

Oh yeah? What do you usually drink?

"A box of wine and a handle of whiskey."

To be fair, there are unusual incentives in place here -- depending on the specific circumstances, each individual task or procedure a doctor performs may end up being coded differently for insurance reimbursement purposes. The focus of doctors on piece work is incentivized by the way insurance works.