>>>Doctors, in general, are far smarter, in general, than are lawyers.
Yes, I hear that often . . . but only from doctors. I never hear it from lawyers. I’ve also seen no data to support that statement from neutral third parties (like psychologists) who could test the two groups and compare the results. Personally, I’ve met plenty of very stupid doctors.
>>>Some of them are young, more naive and inexperienced and in debt…they can’t pick up and move as easily as those with grey hair, lots of experience in dealing with the licensing boards and regulators.
Sorry, I don’t understand the relation between not having grey hair and not being able to relocate easily. School debt will follow them irrespective of where live. There’s no way out of school debt — no bankruptcy procedure — except to pay it back or literally leave the country. There is no licensure requirement or state investigation or federal investigation of someone’s debt status if he moves from Vermont to Texas. He simply moves and lets “Aspire” or some other debt-consolidation agency know where he is. It takes precisely ZERO time.
>>>So, though you smirk more in sorrow rather than in anger, doctors are far better prepared for this than are patients. And those waxing smug after a lifetime of envying and resenting doctors.
The reason I wax smug is not because I envy doctors, nor because I resent them. For many decades there has been a hand-in-glove relationship between the medical profession and government (both state and federal). The late Thomas Szasz, MD (author of “The Myth of Mental Illness” which promptly got him blacklisted from the A.P.A.) wrote that the state legitimizes doctors via licensing (i.e., “You, with your specific kind of allopathic training, are legit; you are a ‘real’ doctor. Everyone else without that kind of training is either NOT a ‘real’ doctor or simply a quack), and in return, the medical profession reports to state authorities who was born, who died, and who has various kinds of STDs (HIV, for example). Under Obamacare, the state (via the IRS) will know who drinks, who smokes, etc., etc.
I am smug because — sorry — this is what happens when you make a deal with the devil. Getting special favors from government in order to protect your market (er, uh, for the public’s own good, of course!) is always a devil’s bargain, and will inevitably bite you in the rear end. It’s now biting doctors in their collective gluteus maximi. I feel sorry for them . . . and, without question, I feel even more sorry for patients. Ultimately, it will be the consumers of medical care who will suffer the most.
>>>Guild, my foot. It takes a multimillion dollar infrastructure to educate any kind of health pro…doc, dentist or nurse.
Yes, I hear that often. But only from the providers of multimillion dollar infrastructures (”You need us! Can’t you see that?”). The historical facts are that the AMA fought to have states license only “approved” medical schools in order to squelch competition from two groups of care providers that were extremely popular with Americans in the mid-19th century: homeopaths and eclectics. Instead of competing freely with them in a spirit of “May the best kind of care win,” they sought to eliminate competition by means of state force. That’s the history, and those are the facts. See this PDF:
http://mises.org/journals/jls/3_1/3_1_5.pdf
“The Early Development of State Licensing Laws in the United States, 1875-1900”
Also watch Milton Friedman’s talk to doctors at the Mayo Clinic in 1978 on the trend toward greater government regulation and socialized medicine in the US:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJgbc8ojYUg&list=PL5E904E0D6DCAAA62
(in 6 parts)
Friedman picks up where the PDF linked above leaves off, as he mentions the famous report by Abraham Flexner in 1910, the upshot of which was to close down many medical schools in the US, thus limiting how many bright students — all whom might have done very well on their organic chem exams — could become doctors.
See this link for a brief description of the Flexner Report:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
Oh, certainly.
However, how many lawyers do you know who were doctors *first*--?
I know *Many* doctors who went on, almost as a lark, to go to law school because it was more like Book Club compared to the demands and intensity of their medical educations. They wanted to enhance their medical degrees with a layer of knowledge to protect them from lawyers.
I have never met a single lawyer who went on to medical school, and it would certainly enhance the ambitions of a medical malpractice specialist.
For that matter, few lawyers become anything else. They don't become engineers, nurses or other technicians. Now, many nurses go to law school and end up suing doctors. But lawyers just stay what they are, unless they write legal thrillers.
This is because law school is the default next step for many non-useful BA degrees, and the useless grads have nowhere else to go. Law school has no prerequisites like organic chemistry or calculus. You can get a degree in bed wetting and some law school, somewhere (Texas seems to have one on every city block) will turn you into a lawyer.
It is tiresome to point out that the AMA represents less than 17% of physicians, and most of those they represent are non-clincians, but want to be administrators and bureaucrats and stay far away from patients.
Th AMA is little more than the holder of patents for medical documentation that they've promoted to the Obama admin in exchange for selling out doctors' interests. Sort of like your average GOP senator, like Rubio, delivering the conservative voters while quietly supporting amnesty.
The AMA also has little to do with licensing--that is left to the states who want the doctors they educate to stay in state--unless those states are run by morons like in Vermont. Most doctors in Vermont, I believe, are not educated in Vermont and probably come for the rural scenery. They draw off of Massachusetts medical schools.
Gee…was Milton Friedman in the private sector? Really?
The younger the doc, the more likely they are still in debt. Also young med grads have a bad habit of overspending their first years out of residency, having bought into a cliché of having lots of money when they are merely upper middle class, at least with primary care physicians. Two public school teachers make about as much as a primary care physician. It costs close to nothing to educate another pernicious educator.
Now, if you want to be an interventionist cardiologist (who puts in stents)--you face about ten years of post medical school education, and you can charge plenty! And those who have those stents put in--well, a lot of them are lawyers, so maybe it wasn't worth it…but they'll take that stent anyway.
I was amused recently by listening to a confirmed, smug, doctor-hater try to deal with having his ticker and his life, and his quality of life, saved by an interventionist cardiologist. And the bill for the doctor's skill and effort was tiny, just about what that doctor-hater earned in a week. The bill for having the use of that multi-million dollar hospital for a few hours, however, was much more. The doctor-hater was in a real quandary, since he wouldn't be around to hate doctors without a doctor. He managed well, however, to be both ungrateful and ungracious and dismissive and a Democrat.