Under our current system of medical education medical schools admit roughly 2/3’s of those that they deem qualified for medical school—they all have substantial wait lists. Is it possible to make a coherent argument for this without also arguing that it would be reasonable to limit the number of those going into medical specialties?
You could save yourself a lot of uninformed cogitating on the matter by watching Friedman’s “Free to Choose” which has been updated and is being streamed online at
http://www.ideachannel.tv/
Are there capacity limitations? If there aren’t (meaning they could theoretically admit and train every viable candidate out there who applies), then there’s really no excuse other than that they want to keep the wages of doctors higher.
Of course, the sensible thing would be for the gummint to set standards for knowledge, ability, performance, etc., and let anybody in the world enter the practice of medicine, whether he has sat in classrooms or not.
Even better would be to allow anybody from anywhere with any degree of knowledge hang up a shingle and offer his services to the public.
That’s how invention and fruit selling work in Amerika. We lead the world in the quality, utility, cost and availability of inventions and fruits because of that. In Amerika, persons as dumb and unschooled as Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone changed the world for the better.
We trail almost all countries in the world in medical care because of gummint control. We have changed promising medical practitioners into hogs feeding at the insurance/medicare/medicaid trough.
That’s pretty much the whole point of medical licensing.
And when they get some (or many) people killed? I’m guessing you’d say “Caveat Emptor”, but the dead unfortunately don’t tend to keep their problems to themselves.
There’s actually a significant amount of licensing involved with engineering, because engineers can be held liable for their mistakes. Even with inventions, though, they tend to have a whole bunch of rules to help shield the community (we don’t, for example, allow anyone to just set up his own nuclear testing ground anywhere on private property that he owns).
Most of the rest of the developed world has a significantly greater government role (whether in management or in funding) than the US. The developing world is another story.
Dave –
Do you have the citation for the “deem qualified?”
The answer to your question, if the restriction is true, is of course “no.”
Sure. Every medical school has a waiting list (sometimes called an “alternate list”). By definition that means that the medical school considers those on the waiting list to be qualified. If that’s not true they are prospectively admitting unqualified candidates. Unqualified candidates aren’t put on alternate lists—they’re rejected outright.
Med schools are generally pretty coy about how long their alternate lists are. My researches on the subject (done school by school) have suggested that the alternate lists are about 40% of the enrollment. I’ll see if I can produce some links for you. As I say, it’s pretty much school by school.
Isn’t cui bono always the place to start? The answer is not the public.
Wrong Brett: To gain a medical license, you have to spend umteen years in school. To demonstrate knowledge and skill, all you have to do is take a test. As for licensing of engineers, I have personally contributed as an engineer to missiles, rockets, bombers, fighters and nuclear-weapons’ triggers for years without once having been licensed. Nor were any of the famous physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, as far as I know.
Thomas Edison, Nickola Tesla, Henry Ford and the Wright Bros were not licensed, either.
Licensing is one of many factors that interfere with medical care, legal care and education in Amerika.
“If that’s not true they are prospectively admitting unqualified candidates. Unqualified candidates aren’t put on alternate lists—they’re rejected outright.”
That’s a hard point to argue with on its face. But let me fade the argument a bit. I recall, oh so many years ago, being put on a certain high ranking business school in Boston’s “waiting list,” but not following up because I was admitted to the best business school in America – the Mighty University of Chicago. There is pecking order at work here. But I digress……
More to the point. Certain schools want to retain the real or perceived aura of exclusivity. So let’s say Northwestern U med school has a waiting list, because they deem a candidate acceptable, but just not acceptable enought to make the current NU cut. It doesn’t follow that said waiting list candidate is not admitted to med school at all, just that they might end up at, say, Indiana University med school. And so this tiering process goes down the pecking order. The overall pool of med school candidates in not necessarily curtailed, its just arrayed in the pecking order of med schools.
The same could actually be said for any discipline, not just medicine. You might apply to Cal Tech or MIT engineering schools. You may be on an alternative list. You may or may not get into MIT. However, you may ultimately get accepted by Purdue University and become a fine engineer. (Having worked – in a prior life – with many MITers, I’d actually say a superior engineer. But again I digress.) There is no pervasive evil cabal to restrict the pool of engineers graduated in the US. And the fact that MIT or CalTech have waiting lists is not evidence of of same. Its just that there is a tiering admissions process.
So the issue ultimately devolves to: after those med school applicants on waiting lists at Chicago, Duke, Stanford, Northwestern, UCLA, Baylor etc eventually take slots at Indiana, North Carolina, UIC, Kansas etc……….are we really left with the impression that there is a vast pool of sparkling candidates qualified to go to Harvard Medical School but who, through admissions manipulation, have been denied the opportunity to go to medical school at all?
Methinks nmot. Theirs always Grenada, you know.