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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

Has America considered doubling the number of doctors, nurses, hospitals, and all other medical support, building and bootstrapping many more medical schools, and graduating an enormous cadre of recruits from a seven year program, all at a cost probably over a trillion dollars a year, so that we can care for a massive influx of Covid patients in preference to advocating booster shots?

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We need to do that anyway, but then the doctors that make those decisions wouldn’t get paid nearly as much. There is absolutely an artificial scarcity of MDs in the medical field that needs to be discussed.

You're getting a massive influx even if the booster shots have 100% uptake, so let's just stop restricting the number of residencies and let the doctors we already train... work as doctors!

That's not the real cost. They could double the number of doctors by cutting the amount of education required by half, and get better results. And they wouldn't need to expand medical school capacity at all.

The amount of education doctors get is harmful. It actually makes them worse at their job. It's effectively a form of hazing by AMA.

There's a combinatorial explosion of effects and side effects in the human body. It's important to learn and memorize, and memorization is undervalued, but not to that extent. It's like memorizing optimal solutions to traveling salesman instances. Other times it's like memorizing a times table of the three-digit numbers. That is a waste of time and will make you a much worse mathematician.

That's one of the dumbest things I heard in a long time

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