South Korean doctors hold massive anti-government rally over medical school recruitment plan

They should just leave Korea behind and go to the US and or Canada where doctors are in short demand. If they don't want to travel far from home they could go to Guam, the little island is crying out for all kinds of doctors and get paid in US dollars.

When will workers decide that we have value?

I am sorry in big demand, because of short supply of doctors.

Government didn’t need to make such an announcement to increase number of admissions to medical schools. They could have just done it without announcing it.

The increase seems a bit steep and clearly some feel threatened.

But many doctors have vehemently protested the plan, saying medical schools can’t handle such a sharp increase in the number of students.

It is truly amazing how protesters can justify supporting a walkout (a walkout btw, that will put further stress on an already strained healthcare system) based on such an absolute load of bull.

Doctors say adding too many new doctors would also result in an increase in public medical expenses since greater competition would lead to excess treatments.

So apparently these doctors believe that the risk of rising costs attributed to excess treatment is a more urgent danger than the risk of leaving patients untreated due to a lack of doctors? What makes this even more absurd is that doctors are the ones who oversee treatment and would be solely responsible for rampant over treatment. These doctors are essentially using excess treatment as a nice way of threatening to inflate patient bills and drive up costs if they don’t get their way.

It is embarrassingly obvious that this protest is about greed, and yet, there are still people who will choose to blame the government because the sociopolitical environment in South Korea has raised generations of protesters into believing that confront the uncomfortable but very very obvious reality. The sociopolitical

So, they are move from 13,000 to 15,000 interns? Doesn't seem a big deal to me.

justasking

They should just leave Korea behind and go to the US and or Canada where doctors are in short demand. If they don't want to travel far from home they could go to Guam, the little island is crying out for all kinds of doctors and get paid in US dollars.

They are interns. They wouldn't be able to get a job as a doctor in the US.

The increase seems a bit steep

What’s even steeper? South Korea’s population collapse, which is creating this situation of a rapidly aging population and not enough people to care for the elderly.

For those lacking the context, this doubling of new medical school enrollment has nothing to do with medical system needs and everything to do with appeasing voters wishing to put their children through medical schools.

Korean doctors average $400K/year in salary and every parent wants that sweet sweet life for their children, so the competition to get into medical school is fierce, you have medical school intent 4th graders solving Calculus problems and speaking fluent English.

This voter appeasing agenda is opposed by doctors themselves and the big businesses, who fear that the brightest students who would be designing Korea's future 1nm AI processors and self-driving EVs go to medical schools instead. In Korea, there are literally college majors where you are guaranteed a $100K/year starting salary job with the likes of Hyundai, Samsung, LG, Naver, etc upon graduation just for enrolling, but even these would be losing talents to medical schools.

@Samit Basu

the part where you blame mothers and big businesses is the most ridiculous take I’ve heard yet.

There is a shortage of doctors. Increasing the number of medical school patients will help close the gap in need. Doctors enjoy both money and prestige. The medical interns and residents are seeking to one day attain the same money and prestige. Both are upset because all of their lives they have been forced by their parents to literally study to the brink of death to get into med school and it makes them bitter to think that an increase in the supply of doctors/med school students might make them feel slightly less prestigious. More importantly, matching supply with demand will ultimately lead to increased competition which will almost certainly result in them seeing their salaries driven closer to the market clearing wage (their salaries will likely go down). And they pretty much admitted to this by claiming that they will resort to excess treatment. This is so damn obvious and yet the people in South Korea supporting these doctors would rather try to seize an opportunity to shift blame to the government than face the uncomfortable truth that lies behind their protests. The truth being, that when faced with a choice, South Korea’s doctors have shown that they will choose their own financial and social interests over the health and well-being of those in need of care. Here they are literally trying to sabotage government efforts to address a critical doctor shortage. Keep in mind, that the ones most affected by the doctor shortage will be the elderly and people from poorer rural communities. People don’t like the truth because it reveals a very ugly flaw in the hyper-competitive nature of Asian societies where prestige takes precedent over morality.

This voter appeasing agenda is opposed by doctors themselves and the big businesses, who fear that the brightest students who would be designing Korea's future 1nm AI processors and self-driving EVs go to medical schools instead.

Lol, of course you would rather believe quasi conspiracy theories than the painfully obvious truth.

They should just leave Korea behind and go to the US and or Canada where doctors are in short demand. If they don't want to travel far from home they could go to Guam, the little island is crying out for all kinds of doctors and get paid in US dollars.

Except I’d personally never want any doctor that abandons patients in their home state because they essentially want to undermine their governments efforts to address a critical doctor shortage.