February 12, 2012
The Washington Post is widely known as a hotbed of Neanderthal protectionism, strongly supporting measures that shield highly educated professionals from international competition. This has the effect of redistributing income from autoworkers, textile workers and other people who have been subjected to international competition by deliberate policy to the highly educated workers who enjoy protection.
It carried its protectionist agenda a step further in a lengthy front page business section piece that told readers that:
“It is no exaggeration to say that the success of the health-care law rests on young doctors choosing to do something that is not in their economic self-interest.”
This view is also pounded home in the headline to the print version of the article:
“The health-care overhaul depends on primary-care doctors. They work more and earn less. Who’d sign up for that?”
Remarkably the piece never once mentions the possibility of filling any potential shortage of primary care physicians with an increased number of foreign doctors. The article reports that the median compensation for primary care physicians is $208,700 a year.
There is no shortage of smart people in countries like China, India, Mexico and elsewhere who would be happy to train to U.S. standards, become completely fluent in English and work for half of this wage. The gap in wages between the United States and these countries is so large that doctors from these countries would be far ahead of what they could earn in their home countries even if they only made $100,000 a year.
It is also simple to design systems that would repatriate a portion of the earnings of immigrant doctors to their home countries so that they can train 2-3 doctors for each one that came to the United States. This could ensure that the countries sending doctors to the United States also saw improvements to their health care systems.
Unfortunately the Washington Post, like most of the political elite, is so committed to its protectionist agenda that it does not want such possibilities to even be discussed.
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