Why doctors in America earn so much
A mismanaged training system has artificially depressed the supply of medics
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), in a decade America will have a shortage of up to 124,000 doctors. This makes no sense. The profession is lavishly paid: $350,000 is the average salary according to a recent paper by Joshua Gottlieb, an economist at the University of Chicago, and colleagues. Lots of people want to train as doctors: over 85,000 people take the medical-college admission test each year, and more than half of all medical-school applicants are rejected. And yet there is a shortage of doctors. What is going on?
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This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “The gilded age”
From the November 4th 2023 edition
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