> No, there are many options between 'profit' and 150k costs.
Why are you bringing $150,000 into this? That's the median debt load of a resident - it has nothing to do with what a hospital makes.
> The question is can Medicare increase the number of residency's without increasing Medicare's costs. And because of the excessive number of specialists with higher associated costs the answer to that is clearly 'Yes'.
I... don't even understand what point you're trying to make here. The point is that hospitals cannot generally provide self-funded residency programs, because they lose money on those programs.
Yeas, it's true that not all residency programs cost the same amount - some fields are more expensive than others. But it's not like we're trying to optimize for the total number of residents in the system at any time; the reason we have more expensive programs like neurology is because we need neurologists. Yeah, we could "save money" by training them in EM instead, but then that'd just mean an even greater shortage of neurologists (and even higher market wages for neurologists).
Because 150k/year is the current subsidy per resident. People may reasonably not want to spend more money on this, but it's hard to argue with spending money more efficiently.
Why are you bringing $150,000 into this? That's the median debt load of a resident - it has nothing to do with what a hospital makes.
> The question is can Medicare increase the number of residency's without increasing Medicare's costs. And because of the excessive number of specialists with higher associated costs the answer to that is clearly 'Yes'.
I... don't even understand what point you're trying to make here. The point is that hospitals cannot generally provide self-funded residency programs, because they lose money on those programs.
Yeas, it's true that not all residency programs cost the same amount - some fields are more expensive than others. But it's not like we're trying to optimize for the total number of residents in the system at any time; the reason we have more expensive programs like neurology is because we need neurologists. Yeah, we could "save money" by training them in EM instead, but then that'd just mean an even greater shortage of neurologists (and even higher market wages for neurologists).