Many years ago, I was walking down the street with Pete Colwell, a professor for many years at Illinois and a delightful guy. He said that he looked forward to the day when doctors would peddle their wares on the street–he imagined ads that went something like, “I’ll take your pulse for $5!”
Needless to say, Pete is a libertarian, and as such, resents the barriers to entry for becoming a physician. The conversation came to me this morning, because I asked my wife, who has been teaching at the USC Keck Medical School for about eight months now, how the medical students there were. Her answer: “they are very good. After all, they are medical students!”
And so it is that medical students in all US medical schools are very good–because it is hard to get into medical school. When I was the MBA Dean at GW, I did some research on admissions standards at various types of professional schools, and I found that for medical schools, they are extraordinarily rigorous. The typical med student went to a selective college and earned a 3.7 GPA in a science. To say this is rationing would be an understatement.
But is it a bad idea? Like most economists, I have an instinctive aversion to barriers to entry. But when a friend, a family member, or I see a doctor, I have to know that she is really good. The barriers to entry to becoming a physician may indeed be too high (maybe a 3.5 in the sciences should be good enough). But as consumers of health care, we are not in a position to make judgments about competence. I also really don’t think we want to glean information about physicians via much larger variations in mortality and morbidity than we currently observe.
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder