Why don't we have free trade for highly paid professions in the U.S.?

Terrible take all around, and it's just sad how ignorant people on this sub are about this. Before the Flexner Report, healthcare in the U.S. was complete trash. It was cheap, but it was still not worth the money spent. Homeopathy was widely practiced, and medicine was non-standardized and not evidence-based. You can't get evidence-based medicine from an unregulated market because the average layperson (yes, even the educated members of this sub) are very ignorant about the complexities of medicine and medical care, and obviously don't have time to keep up with the scientific literature on what constitutes good care. Often the effects of good medical care are preventative and not readily visible so laypeople are incapable of evaluating the difference between good and bad medical care. If a doctor has good bedside manner (by which I mean, they're nice and talk to the patients for more time) but are terrible at managing care, they are rated higher by patients than a doctor who spent 10 minutes with the patient but diagnosed them correctly, and gave them a treatment that saved their life.

Also, the AMA doesn't limit the number of doctors, Congress does. The AMA is lobbying for more residency training positions, but since the training is funded by Medicare (which caps the number of spots to cut costs) and most hospitals don't want to take on the cost of training more doctors without the funding, the exact same number of doctors are trained every year despite more medical schools opening and more U.S. medical students graduating each year. The only thing that changes is that more U.S. medical students fill those spots and less foreign medical students fill those spots.

I actually don't oppose making more nations' medical licensing equivalent to the U.S.'s, but I don't think this will solve the problem in the long run. We need to produce more doctors, not just take more from other countries.

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