"Rook" has some thoughts on ObamaCare and the number of doctors available.
Obamacare's Biggest Threat: Too Few Doctors - Obamacare - Fox Nation
The health reform law’s biggest threat: 30,000 too few doctors - The Washington Post
They are primary-care residents at Children’s National Medical Center. A third of their class has more than $200,000 each in student loan debt.
At the end of residency, they can stay in primary care and earn $29.58 an hour. Or they can specialize and make $74.45 an hour.
The article goes into enough of usual policy-wonkish details to make your head spin, but the bottom line is still the same.
You can't dump vastly increased demand at severely restricted and falling supply, and expect everything will be OK for everybody. In a free market the price competition would balance out supply and demand. But the socialist solution is to stifle and destroy the free market, and replace it with a top down command economy.
The trouble is, you can't order people to be smart, you can't order them to go into professions where they don't see a future, you can't order them to study, you can't order to them to pass their exams.
Especially not when the government's real goal is to equalize their wages with that of a street sweeper, as they have done in communist Eastern Europe, in the name of social justice. The compensation to the doctors was supposed to be nothing but the satisfaction of helping people, fulfilling the demands of a carefully and deliberately cultivated sense of "social conscience" -- of not actually having to push a broom for the very same pay. It's the social worker / peace corps volunteer mentality, to which you are supposed to be committed for a lifetime. Nobody bothers to ask and answer the implied question, how are you supposed to provide for your own needs, raise a family, repay your debts, etc., from the pay of a volunteer? Ah, socialism. The modern term for a lifetime of slavery.
Been done already in both in communist Hungary and in socialist France with utter failure.
In the US, while we still have time, we'd better remember, you get what you pay for. I get much better care from a doctor who is paid reasonably - that is, well enough to keep him practicing his profession and encouraging his successors to follow in his footsteps.
If we can't afford Medicare, how can we afford ObamaCare?
Posted by: Franklin | February 16, 2012 at 01:47 PM