my connection with the tea party

[Jester]

The doctors would get a fair market rate. Maybe just not as much as they could going into private practice, but that is a risk too. This way, they could negate a big part of their debt, get experience, and be altruistically contributing to society.

You negate debt with money. Debt negated directly is just money you didn't get to spend elsewhere. From the government's perspective, forgiving a dollar of debt is not materially different from paying a dollar of wages. (For doctors, who are unlikely to default, that is.) The net wage is still the net wage.

Doctors already have lots of options for being altruistic, taking a pay cut, or being greedy, and maximizing revenue. It seems like this would just be channeling them into the public sector. I'm all for public sector medicine, so I'm for this too, but I'm not seeing how this changes the incentives for *enrollment*, which is how you'd get supply up, and prices down.

When I said cost less 10 %, I expected the government to eat the 10% loss (about $500 million). I'm just throwing these % around though by gut feel based on experience, you might be able to create a system with less overhead, and tighter margins reducing the overall cost and achieving the same results.

Okay. So government hires doctors at a loss in order to provide social-welfare enhancing services. Easy.

Why does this reduce overhead? Other than your gut feeling? It sounds like any other program, public or private: hire workers to do a job. File paperwork accordingly.

-Jester