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Of course, we shouldn’t hold our breath for this research (and reams of other relevant research) to get applied to medical residents, who are killing people at a frightening rate due to forced sleep deprivation.

And let’s not miss the connection with the march towards fully socialized medicine. Overwork of residents started out as essentially a hazing ritual, in an era when virtually all residents were young men with non-working wives or mothers attending to much of their personal and family responsibilities. The only reason the practice has survived is because it’s the only way to prop up the economics of socialized medicine. If residents’ hours were reduced by the percentage of time spent on non-paying and underpaying patients that the hospital is required to treat for free or for whatever Medicaid/Medicare will pay, they’d probably be working less than 40 hours a week. In other words, they’d have plenty of time for charity care, except that true charity care (i.e. voluntarily given to those the giver believes are deserving) isn’t allowed in our universally socialized hospitals.