[supercat]

One of the tragedies of socialism is that it can be made to 'work', for awhile, by invisibly eating away at types of capital that don't appear on any balance sheets. Such action can continue until the capital is all dried up, whereupon the problem will be blamed not on the socialist program that used up all the capital, but on someone else.

In the case of medicine, this may be illustrated by considering that there are two significant income threshholds for medical professionals:

1. An income sufficient to make doctoring more worthwhile than any other line of work, for someone who already has all the required training.
2. An income sufficient to make doctoring so much more worthwhile than any other line of work that it's worthwhile for people to train to become doctors.

Obviously the second threshhold is considerably higher than the first; prices between the two threshholds will be sustainable for a few years, but will become unsustainable as doctors retire and are not replaced.

What happens, really, is that the country has considerable capital in the form of people with doctor-level medical training. If physician salaries are constrained to be below the point where few new people choose to enter the field, that capital base will be eroded. It won't show up on any balance sheet, but once it's gone there will be no way to repair the medical establishment without spending money somehow to rebuild that capital base. Of course, those who seek to do that will be accused of causing the problem in the first place.

[exDemMom]

If physician salaries are constrained to be below the point where few new people choose to enter the field...

Isn't that already happening? I seem to remember Dr. Dean Edell mentioning that medical school applications are down, not to the point that we're about to suffer a doctor shortage, but forcing the schools to be less selective about admissions, so the overall quality of students (and future MDs) is lower.