How Many Oranges does it Take to Make One Apple?

Feminists and the politically correct junkies must be pretty pleased by the recent trend in the US medicine: since 2003 the number of female medical students has surpassed the number of their male counterparts. Hallelujah!

Not so fast! Societies blessed with socialized medicine have long been complaining about problems associated with prevalence of female physicians. Some went even so far as to call training women in medicine a waste of time. Their rationale? Women tend to work fewer hours, take less call and retire earlier than their male colleagues. Women in our society are still widely expected to carry the brunt of child rearing, to take care of the elderly parents, and to keep the home, hence their inability to keep as crazy a work schedule as their male colleagues.

The latest study published in "Medical Economics" journal issue on October 23, 2009 has found that in terms of hours worked per week, there is now practically no difference between male and female primary care doctors. So were our critics wrong? Not really. In that equal number of hours, male doctors saw an average of 102 patients per week, whereas female physicians averaged 78 patient visits per week. So female doctors' productivity was just 76% of that of males, all other factors being equal. In other words, it takes more than one woman doctor to replace a man.

Why this is happening is beyond the scope of this short article. I suppose that women simply take more time to talk to their patients, to hold their hands, to let them cry on their shoulder. Who do you prefer to see as your doctor: male of female? I like females, hands down.

The problem the society is facing, though, is that with more women entering the field of medicine, we need to budget many more jobs for them to see the patient numbers previously seen by men. The matter is further exacerbated by the fact that potentially 30 million new patients will soon have medical insurance, and will be making regular appointments to see their primary care doctors. This will inevitably create a tremendous bottleneck: more patients, and a larger proportion of less productive doctors.

It gets worse. If we want to curb or even cut the cost of providing medical care while throwing 10% more patients into the mix, this means that doctor's compensation will go down. Becoming a physician is a long process of very intensive study. And then in their professional capacity, one has to deal with cranky people at all hours of day and night who are in pain and who expect you to take care of them. If on top of that the pay is not good (and the pay has been going down for the US doctors in the past 10 years - and will inevitably go down considerably with the health care reform), the brightest males start looking elsewhere to utilize their brains. Female dominated field of medicine is what inexorably awaits us in the future. Consider the trend in all countries with socialized medicine: up to 86% of physicians in the Soviet Union were women, half of all doctors under 40 in Canada are females, etc. And once the brightest males stop coming to the medical schools, the caliber of students will become to degrade, and mediocrity will start creeping in. This vicious circle will keep feeding on itself. Eventually, just like every people have the government they deserve, every nation has the quality of doctors commensurable with their compensation from the society. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Somehow we all understand that bankers deserve the $50 million bonuses - the industry argues, that if you don't pay them, the most talented [crooks] won't come. (And how much do they exactly have to study to become the most talented crooks on Wall Street? Four years? Wow!!!) Do you seriously expect the best and the brightest people in the nation to spend at least 11 years of exhaustive training to be getting less than $100,000 a year in return? Dream on.

Tu l'as voulu, George Dandin!