Fix healthcare by increasing supply

I previously wrote about my experience getting blood tests in a Chinese public hospital and how fast, efficient and inexpensive the whole process was.

One of the things that struck me was how much better and more accessible healthcare is in the Chinese mainland than two decades ago when I first arrived. I did a bunch of reading on what's changed over the past years. It's apparent that China treats healthcare and all the inputs to it - doctors, nurses, medicine, hospital buildings, etc -as inputs whose supply should be increased and cost should be decreased. There's been a targeted effort to significantly increase the supply of medical education and production of doctors.

Compare this to the USA which caps the number of positions for medical residencies based on numbers 30 years ago in 1996.

Another thing they do is to amortize the fixed costs of building, equipment and even personnel over a much larger volume of patients. This was pretty obvious during my visit where the dozen or so nurses in the blood collection area were collecting samples at the rate of one patient every ~2 to 4 minutes. It's hard to imagine nurses in American practices processing such a large volume of patients at such a high speed. In fact, my experience with American medicine is that speed and efficiency is the last thing you'll get. Unless you're talking about the speed of the doctor leaving your examination room after he made you wait 30 minutes past your scheduled appointment to see you.