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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

The issue isn't a shortage of residency slots, it's that we don't allow doctors with foreign residencies to practice in the United States.

The physicians in Spain and South Korea and Costa Rica are really good. Arguably better than American doctors based on health outcomes. Many would jump at the chance to earn high American wages. There's no reason a South Korean doctor with ten years of experience in the world leading hospitals of Seoul shouldn't be allowed to practice medicine in the US just because he didn't do a residency in rural Alabama

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Ah. The good ol’ “steal the good workers from the poor countries to serve my wealthy country that doesn’t want to invest in training its own workers” argument. What happens when those workers are tapped and/or the cost/benefit for them is not attractive? Back to square one.

There's 1.1 million physicians in the US, and about 12.8 million worldwide. Almost all of whom are making substantially lower salaries than their American counterparts. Many more than 50% lower. Even if 10% were willing to immigrate for a huge wage boost we could replace every doctor in America multiple times over.

Huge wage boost erased by increased supply and much higher living costs. Also, I am not convinced quality is the same and language barrier results in poor communication with patients. Let other countries have their doctors and train doctors in your own country is the proper and moral solution.

There are numerous physicians who have immigrated to the US already and are stuck working menial jobs instead of providing people with care when they are fully qualified to do so. There’s absolutely no good reason for this.

I mean, that's one solution to a similar problem - but we also have a fixed number of residency slots and an increasing number of med school graduates, including overseas ones who could come to the US and complete their training in US Residency programs.

https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/medical-school-enrollment...

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