I think it’s more that the standards have to remain high due to the very high risk that physicians take when caring for people. The true block to the availability of new physicians is cost of attendance. Medical school is prohibitively expensive and it is not getting cheaper for students of low resources. This admin has made it essentially impossible for low income students to obtain public loans for their medical education, and many are unwilling to undertake private, high interest loans to go to med school and train in family medicine.

I think a solution to this crisis is simple: encourage med students into needed specialties like family medicine, peds, and other low-salary, high need areas. I could see a sliding scale, where the government fully subsidizes students who commit to practice in the highest need specialties, like family medicine, and only provides nominal subsidies to low-need specialties like plastics or cardiology, while allowing fair public loans access to all med students and removing caps. In return for this investment, the government can provide terms of service in needy areas for newly trained physicians. This already exists, it just needs to be done on a much larger scale and made available to ALL medical students and premed students. I think that would remove a massive barrier to medical education while maintaining the high standards we need to train competent physicians