How many medical school slots there are is mostly irrelevant.
The real bottleneck in the supply of doctors comes from the shortage of residency positions relative to national and international graduates. Residency spots are enormously expensive. No residency, no doctor.
I have read the posts above, and doing some quick back of the envelope direct costings, I still can’t see why a medical education is so much more than any of the other sciences of engineering disciplines.
What is the reason residency costs are so expensive? What are the costs involved?
Has anybody ever put together a line item costing for a medical education?
I’m not trying to be a jerk here, I am just curious and would like to see some numbers.
It’s not the medical education that costs so much, it’s the medical school – if you want to create more of them. A medical school requires a hospital. (The residency positions require hospitals even more directly.) A modern medical school requires a modern hospital. A hospital is far more expensive to build than any engineering lab.
There are many more hospitals in the U.S. than there are med schools. How much of a difference is there between a regular modern hospital and one attached to a medical school?
Many private hospitals aren’t comprehensive enough, even within a speciality, and can’t expose new doctors to everything they need to learn. Not to mention there needs to be funding from somewhere and staff that can and will teach, many doctors choose non-teaching hospitals specifically to avoid that.
Note that some hospitals may be affiliated with more than one school or may accept students from more than one medical school in their clinical rotations. IIRC, that’s how some of the so-called Caribbean schools and other smaller medical schools work (and also how different students from different schools get externships and experiences outside of their “home” medical school).