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.
No comments:
Post a Comment