Doctors under Obamacare

The Bookworm Room discusses why we may lose doctors under Obamacare.

The one thing that Obama supporters are not discussing is the making of a doctor. The good doctors we have come as the result of a grueling process. The best and the brightest, rather than leaving college and going off to make money, instead opt for the following:

1. Four more years of graduate training, including (a) the trauma of anatomy classes and (b) the exhaustion of clinical work, which is what they do in the last two years. The students pay to do this (or go into debt), with even the state funded medical schools costing about $40,0o0 — and that’s a minimum. Go to Harvard, and you’re out of pocket about $150,000 for this training.
....
If medicine is no longer remunerative, there is no incentive for good people to make these kinds of sacrifices. I’ll remind you that, in the former Soviet Union, medicine was a very devalued profession. It was harder work than most other jobs and, because it was essentially uncompensated, no one wanted to do it.