US Dentists Should Compete

Health professionals throughout the world create the impression that tight regulation of entry into the profession is necessary for the reason that people's health should be cared for by highly trained professionals. Perhaps so, but this article in the NYT shows that good times for dentists is not necesarilly good for those with dental problems. Quite to the contrary, dentists are doing well as measured by income in real terms and number of hours worked (more money for less effort) while the access to dental health care is demonstrably poorer.

Again, the question here is one of a regulated profession that tightly restricts entry ostensibly in the interest of patients and ends up serving fewer at higher costs. as the story states, there's complete resistance to allowing entry for people who with much less qualification to provide care to ensure that fees remain high.

The argument here is not that dentists are compelled to provide care to those who cannot afford their fees or even to work 4000 hours per annum, but that they should not be allowed to restrict competition through arbitrary standards that merely provides a financial boom to them at the cost of public who pay for dental care. No doubt a number of them will still earn a high income in an market with more dentists but that will be without denying patients the opportunity to find alternative care. Any approach towards universal dental care would not work while practitioners of dental medicine control numbers and choose which patients to treat.