President Carter’s 1980 budget proposes to prevent an impending over-supply of doctors by completely eliminating funding that has been used by medical schools for nearly a decade to expand their enrollments.
This is the best I can do. I remember Carter asking Universities to not create too many doctors. I’ll do a little more searching.
Exactly. Not just Carter. Clinton did it too, with a GOP Congress. And not just them.
The medical profession has been incrementally restricting growth in the number of doctors for more than 100 years. The problem began to become acute in the 60’s.
The health care establishment hired a bunch of economists to do studies that came to the conclusion that the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to the medical profession so that they could justify additional restrictions on the numbers of doctors. They invented logic that said basically that if you increase the number of doctors, the demand for health care increases because doctors will do all kinds of unnecessary surgery and tests to increase their incomes. They did studies that supposedly proved this. They called it “physician induced demand.”
However, they ignored that there were a lot of other reasons that the demand for health care was increasing at the same time, like the spread of health insurance, the increase of available technologies, the increase in people’s incomes, medicare, etc. It is very difficult to factor out those things, and they were not even trying because they were trying to justify restrictions on the numbers of doctors.
As you can see, though, the price of health care has gone no where but up despite the restrictions they imposed, so it seems pretty obvious that their studies were wrong and the policies they pushed thru backfired. In fact, we are now in a very severe doctor shortage, in every specialty, and even among general practitioners. And that is the number one reason that hospitals have been closing. In order to run a hospital, you’ve got to have doctors. If you don’t, then you’ve got to close your doors.
The net effect is a severe reduction in the supply of health care. No matter how much the government spends on health care, you’re not going to increase the availability of health care unless you increase the number of doctors. All you will do is drive up the price further, just as predicted by the laws of supply and demand.
And guess what? That’s exactly what’s happening.
Of course, there are a lot of politicians in Washington who don’t really want to fix the problem. They just want to use the problem as an excuse to socialize the health care system. They have a vested interest in blocking real efforts toward change. If we increased the number of doctors, that might reduce health care costs, and then they would not have socialized medicine as a political issue to demogogue.
And all of it could be fixed very easily without an increase in the expenditure of public money just by relaxing legal and institutionary restrictions that are designed to restrict the number of doctors. In particular, they could authorize medical schools to increase their enrollment. Currently, the medical profession directly controls the enrollment in medical schools thru their accredidation system.