jac241

To be fair to the AMA, they submitted a support letter for the 2019 bill - https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/how-gme-fundi... . Do you have evidence of them arguing against the 2013, 2015, or 2017 versions?

And 50% of nurses, nurse practitioners, and PAs graduate in the bottom half of their class too. Why do you think they are not the ones whose jobs are going to be automated away? If an AI can handle the easy cases, it won't be the doctors, who are able to deal with the complicated cases, who will lose their jobs.

How much of an average doctor's day is really appointments like this where they just check you lab values and ask you if you're doing okay on your medication and send you on your way? A large number of these cases are already handled by nurse practitioners and PAs. Doctors in my experience spend more time seeing the sicker patients with many chronic medical conditions where the more in depth knowledge of pathology and pharmacology that they spend those years of training acquiring inform the questions they ask, the tests the order, and the physical exam they preform.

I don't think the large majority of PAs and NPs really want to step into the same role as physicians. The number of PAs and NPs who were rejected from medical school and then chose to take either of those routes is probably very small compared to the number who chose to become a PA or NP because they wanted that role and not a doctor's.

The flu vaccine is formulated each year to match the predicted strains expected to cause most human suffering that year. Influenza has a segmented RNA genome that makes it more likely to mutate and change its antigen expression. The flu vaccine saves a significant number of lives each year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza#Replication https://www.cdc.gov/flu/news/flu-vaccine-saved-lives.htm

The shingles vaccine bolsters immunity towards the chicken pox virus so that even when depressed your immune system has enough T-cells against the virus that it does not reactivate. Shingrex is 97% effective at preventing shingles.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25916341

"The AAMC strongly supports bipartisan GME legislation introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act of 2019 (H.R. 1763, S. 348)" - https://news.aamc.org/for-the-media/article/gme-funding-doct...

Ironically, congress passed a law in 2004 to give the NRMP, the organization that runs the match, immunity from antitrust legislation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Resident_Matching_Pro...

In medical school, 120 hour weeks really only exist for 4th year med students who are on sub-internships in surgical specialties like neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, general surgery, etc. Students in those fields do 3 or so month long sub-i's at hospitals they want to do residency at. They basically function as month long interviews for those programs, and are also used to get letters of recommendation from prominent faculty in the field. People who are interested in those fields know about the hour requirements on sub-i's and in residency, and self-select in a way.

The reason resident physicians work so much is because residents make $60k working 80+ hour weeks, and the PAs or NPs who would be willing to cover the floors at night would make $150k+ working 40hrs/wk. Residents also have no collective bargaining power because of the residency match system. You can't easily leave one program and go to another because you don't like the working conditions, for example. If you want to leave, you're more or less blackballed unless you're switching fields. And you don't want to speak up about the conditions because you've got $300k in debt and a degree that's useless until you finish residency.

I am a medical student, and I have taken the MCAT. It is not just a memorization test. Each section is made up of a series of excerpts from scientific papers and questions that relate to that article. It requires you to synthesize the new information from an article with your knowledge of chemistry, biology, etc. to come to the correct answer. From what I understand, the USMLE exams are similar. It is important to score well on the MCAT because medical schools want student who are able to read scientific papers and apply their findings. Medical schools also look beyond just MCAT score and grades when selecting students.