With nurses and doctors making good money; how come there are not more of them?

It seems to me that the problems in our health system are a lack of supply creating big demand and big dollars. Why doesn't our government simply increase the number of doctors, nurses and medical practitioners. What is holding them back? Don't say its money - they spend $700 billion on health care services now.

I don't think you folks get the gravity of our health care crisis. $700 billion a year; it grows by 4% annually. Take just 1% of that and its $7 billion. You can educate about 280,000 people a year in health care jobs for that kind of money. Or you could build 20 medical universities for just 1% of the health care budget. There is a lack of supply of these people, and why doesn't our government work to increase it.

It takes a special person to go into medicine, especially Nursing. Its a hard job that most don't want to do. Would you like to clean old, sick people all day? Doctors need to have a decade of schoooling just to specialize. So they are in debt big time when they come out. Plus the crazy amounts of money people win in malpractice suits stop a lot of doctors from practicing medicine. They just can't afford the insurance.

For doctors, it is high insurance premiums which force them out of high risk specialities. In areas where medical personnel are scarce, they are overworked.

For nurses, long hours, mindnumbing routine, and underappreciation.

The government cannot magically create qualified medical professionals. Becoming a doct takes 8 years of formal schooling plus residence requirments. It can cost more $100,000 just for the tuition. You need qualified individual with the resources to pay the cost of getting the education.

2 words - malpractice insurance!

The healthcare system is privatized and runs amock with overpriced services and premiums because doctors have to insure themselves.

At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry has their hands in the pockets of congress, and has greatly overpriced products as well.

Because of this it takes a lot of time and money to get thruogh medical school, and so on.

The government increasing the number of doctors is pretty stupid. How would they do that? This administration has cut federal funding for school loans already, and other policies such as NCLB should easily explain what this president thinks of education dispite the bone he threw during his SOTU speech in january.

The answer would be to implement a public health system.

And before you start spewing socialist rhetoric at me, just imagine if there were two systems of healthcare-- one private for working folks, where the insurance companies and the drug industry can keep their profits high with capitalist greed (like now) as well as a public health system funded by the gov't with gov't regulated price controls. This would allow more people to get medical care, it would allow more doctors and nurses to be trained, because they wouldn't have to insure themselves against malpractice, and everybody wins.

it could be started by taking about 15% from the Pentagon's budget.