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Originally Posted by Unregistered
Not so drastic but more of drop in income. It is a function of demand and supply.
Demand wise, Population is aging. So per head, there is higher healthcare consumption because people are living longer. But a lot of money goes to drug companies and insurance companies, not just to the doctors.
The drastic increase in supply shifts the supply curve to the rightwards, so the price will drop.
Reasons for increase in supply:
1) a lot more doctors nowadays
2) nurses and pharmacist can actually do some or most of doctor job
3) increasing use of technology.
So price will drop and doctor income will fall. Already we are seeing it.
The reduction in income will spur less students to study mbbs or md.
I personally dont think it is an economical decision to spend $400k to study medicine.
Since income likely to stagnate.
This is not necessarily a bad thing for society as a whole due to cheaper doctor labour with the slight excess manpower capacity. But there is one caveat. With the reduction in income, some doctors may overtreat and monetise the smaller pool of patients.
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So the caveat here is just try to stay away from Primary Care where other healthcare professionals can do to certain extents and try to find a niche field eg Cardiology where there is still a high demand albeit short supply of Doctors fulfilling that role. Remember, Doctors aren’t all the same, you can’t group all Doctors into one group, it also depends on the demographic of society, if there’s a lot of elderly people, then you would expect the demand of cardiologist and ophthalmologists to increase as the elderly tend to develop chronic illnesses like high blood pressure and glaucoma. The list just doesn’t end there, I can even say Orthopedic surgeons are in a good spot, since 60% of elderly experience Osteoarthritis one way or the other and require some form of joint replacement. I would say Doctors instead aren’t in a bad spot as it has always been, although I agree it isn’t as good as it once was, but then again when there were only 300 graduates a year, the population was 800 thousand to 1 million less than it was today. We can expect the number to grow exponentially seeing as the government is targeting 6.9 million population.
If we mirror ourselves to Australia, all the major population centres, Queensland, Sydney and Melbourne, discounting the more rural cities like Perth with very low comparative population. Each city produces 500+ Domestic graduates every year, and yet they are still in need of Doctors. I think 500 as it stands is not as bad as people claim it is, unless we open another medical school, we shouldn’t be too worried about the current medical landscape as we speak. It’s difficult to envision medicine becoming an inferior course in Singapore which is the case in China where there were reports of many students generally placing medicine as their backup option if they didn’t get into engineering school.
The US has pushed other healthcare professions to fill the gap of Doctors by creating roles such as Physician assistant which essentially is just a Primary Care Doctor operating under guidance of a MD. The Salary of Doctors there are still very competitive even when we look at Primary Care Physicians there. Unless we open the gates, and decrease the standards of training to be able to churn out as many Doctors as we can, which is a fools move considering that Doctors deal with people’s lives and we cannot afford to put people who aren’t serious and capable into such a position of responsibility, it’s hard to see the field of medicine to slip from its place in our society today. Therefore, I think it’s an overgeneralization and I would say fear mongering think that the prospect of Doctors is all doom and gloom.