To raise their pay, doctors demanded we stop training new doctors. Now we have a shortage.

NYT in 1997, on the American Medical Association, the lobbying group and cartel for physicians: Doctors Assert There Are Too Many of Them. There are many other01095-9/fulltext) incidents showing their repeated demands from 1980 to early 2000s.

• ”The United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians,” the A.M.A. and five other medical groups said in a joint statement.
• The American Medical Association and representatives of the nation’s medical schools said today that the United States was training far too many doctors and that the number should be cut by at least 20 percent.

Doctor training job counts (residencies) stagnated or declined until 2010, even though the number and competitiveness of applicants exploded: Why well-qualified medical school graduates can’t get jobs — despite doctor shortages

https://preview.redd.it/l3ieepn8wt9e1.jpg?width=674&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=914510ea621ea956e8436ebd940cea7566f1a1ef

The AMA has since reversed its position after seeing that the shortage caused physician burnout. But they list their priorities in order, and increasing payments from Medicare to them is a bigger priority than actually training new doctors:

• Dr. Ehrenfeld enumerated five steps to get us out of this crisis, including specific legislation and solutions from the AMA Recovery Plan for America’s Physicians:
  • Pass meaningful Medicare payment reform
  • …

But would increasing Medicare payments actually reduce healthcare costs? Probably not. Doctors claim Medicare pays so little that they must charge private insurance a markup to make up their costs. But studies show that increasing Medicare reimbursements by $1.00 increases prices paid by private insurance by $1.16.

And it wouldn’t even resolve the shortage unless enough new doctors are trained to compete with current doctors. Increasing payments only reduces doctor attrition. It does not increase supply. Besides, physicians in the US are already paid twice as much as in other countries even when normalizing for US median income and even though medical errors are more common in the US than elsewhere.