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Couple things I've been thinking about this morning that are not reports on inflation hitting a three-year high, the who-even-knows-what's-going-on war in Iran that shows no signs of stopping, the start of the World Cup in the US (no one else seems to care either), or the looming midterms that has a good shot of handing power back to Dems after the GOP have barely done anything other than hold hearings.
I've been thinking about the moratorium that was placed on medical school admission and building new medical schools from 1980 to 2005. I was alerted to this history by an Instagram post and thought "hey, now that sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory but it also sounds a wee bit plausible," so I went to check it out. And what do you know? It turns out that from 1980 to 2005, there was a fear that the US would have too many doctors, so a concerted effort was made to curb their creation.
The American Journal of Medicine published a detailed article about what went down. Our population increased, but the number of doctors we were graduating stayed the same. We saw a 70 million person population increase between 1980 and 2005, but still just graduated 16,000 doctors per year. More residents were needed at US hospitals than previously, some 23,000. And since there weren't enough, foreign doctors were imported. "The number of international medical graduates in US residency programs doubled from 11,424 in 1980 to 22,419 in 2000. The percentage of IMGs in the US physician workforce increased to 25% in 2006," they state.
There were plenty of American applicants to US medical schools, but many of them were rejected because there weren't enough seats. A bunch of those people went to foreign medical schools and came back. But the reason there weren't enough seats had nothing to do with demand, but with a stupid idea that we were going to have too many doctors. "The reason the number of US MD graduates did not increase from 1980 until 2005 was that there was a voluntary 'moratorium' on allopathic medical school enrollment. This moratorium was a result of multiple predictions of an impending US physician surplus," states The American Journal of Medicine.
Who said there was a surplus? The Council on Graduate Medical Education, the Bureau of Health Professions, a consortium including the American Medical Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American Osteopathic Association, the National Medical Association, and the Association of Academic Health Centers. They said there was "compelling evidence that the United States is on the verge of a serious oversupply of physicians." However, that surplus never materialized. And so we keep importing foreign doctors.
All those groups changed their predictions when it turned out they were wrong and now predict a doctor shortage, which we are already experiencing. "In retrospect," said the American Journal of Medicine, "we should have recognized that as the US population increases the number of US medical graduates should increase." The phrase "well, duh" comes to mind. So now, we have hollowed out the medical fields of foreign nations because we're short on doctors, kept American students out of medical school and the lucrative medical profession, hindering American wealth formation, and have outsourced the care of our population to non-Americans.
These, of course, aren't the only stupid predictions. In the 1970s, the federal government, racist Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, Carl Sagan, the Ford Foundation, John D. Rockefeller, and others told us we had too many people, and we had to stop having babies. They said that we were poisoning the earth just by existing.
A Star Trek episode called The Mark of Gideon cautioned against overpopulation, showing that the entire surface of the planet was just covered in people who could barely even move because there were so many of us. Meanwhile, it turns out that the entire population, over 8 billion, could fit into the state of Texas if Texas were remade as a massive city like New York or Hong Kong.
We are not too many, we are more than likely too few, and could fall off a population cliff where we do not have the manpower to cultivate the resources we need to survive as a species. But instead, we engage in abortions, euthanasia, push material wealth over marriage and family, blame ourselves for the changing environment (much as our ancient ancestors did when they believed hurricanes were evidence of their gods' wrath, etc.), all encouraging a reduction in human beings rather than an increase.
Libby