a profession as wealthy as medicine needs the taxpayer to fund its training is preposterous
Most doctors already come from wealthy families (specifically, they have doctor parents) because in addition to the tuition of medical school, there are a variety of other expenses (board examination fees, the undergraduate requirement, interview expenses for both medical school and residency) that are difficult to fund without assistance. Also, compensation for physicians is not what you seem to think it is outside of subspecialized fields, and the expense of medical school (and the opportunity cost of residency) means that physician shortages in the general disciplines will only continue to get worse as medical students realize the only way they can pay back their loans is to subspecialize.
Also, medical schools are primarily limited by number of faculty, and it's difficult to find doctors for med school faculty roles... because they're so poorly compensated in comparison to other opportunities.
If you want more doctors, first provide incentives for doctors to teach, then provide funding for those who normally don't see medical school as an available opportunity, then incentivize people to go into general disciplines, then properly compensate residents so they're not throwing away ten years of potential income, then complain about how "doctors are overpaid but there's also a big shortage of them".
The rest of us have to compete in a free market for our skills. Why not doctors?
I agree that the undergrad requirement is absurd. But it is also just another part of the system that increases entry-barriers and leads to all of these problems, but makes the field more lucrative for a big segment of those who get through it.
You might find this USA Today article relevant and interesting. It's old, from 2005, but crimping the pipeline of doctors coming through the system has impacts that last decades after.
Healthcare is much closer to auto repair than software development.
Sure, on a car that's running that you can't turn off, with parts you can't replace, a maintenance history you can't see, and an ECU that actively misrepresents what's going on.
This is manifestly not the case, and there are a large number of studies showing why this is true (many linked elsewhere in this thread). Most people do not have a good understanding of the risks associated with ongoing medical testing/medical visits.
A hopefully not-too-inaccurate analogy might be if you heard a strange sound while driving your car, and took it into your mechanic, whose shop gets paid more the more tests they do and the more labor they put into fixing your potential non-problem, and they're potentially liable if anything later goes wrong that could be traced to that sound. Think about where the systemic incentives lie.
The way many metabolic conditions work is that essential products are not synthesized, or toxic products are not cleared. These can cause unrecoverable damage within hours or days of birth if not treated. So, tests are performed to identify known metabolic conditions to prevent newborns from suffering unrecoverable brain/otherwise damage. This is generally known as "newborn screening" if you are curious to learn more.
We (for the most part) intrinsically understand the internal nature of naturally generated thoughts, even spontaneous ones. If someone played a recording of your own speech, would you have difficulty determining if you had thought the words or heard them?
This is a reasonable statement to want to make, but (with a vanishingly small number of exceptions), suicide is not a choice. It's the result of depression combined with loss of inhibition (due to stress, chemical imbalance, or other factors). Your rational state of mind now has no bearing on whether you are capable of taking your own life under certain circumstances.
If you guys are interested in going down that rabbit hole, I highly recommend Robert Sapolsky's Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
Although I confess I have only read the first chapter or so, the book sets out to convince its readers that many of the things that can go wrong in the human brain ought not to be thought of as bad choices so much as automobiles in need of a part replacement (this metaphor rings true today in the case of, say, depression, which can often be remedied with pharmaceuticals). This may sound rather weak (especially from the point of a prosecutor [1]), but when looking at the details, it starts to make sense in a lot of cases.
For example: in the middle ages, what do you think people thought schizophrenia was?
Now we’re completely off topic, but I want to reply to this :)
I think of it like this. Perhaps every decision you make is /almost/ entirely determined by your current biological state and a long string of preconditions beyond your control. But… there is a sliver of freewill on top of this. And /with/ that sliver, you can choose to make incremental changes to your personal beliefs which molds your perception. By doing this, you essentially alter your biological state in a small way. This effect is cumulative, so you eventually start making different decisions than you would have, which changes your environment, and thus further changes the preconditions of your future. In this way, I believe freewill itself is cumulative. You are born with almost none, but you can develop it incrementally with effort.
Probably the most interesting answer I could have imagined to this, and from what I gather from Sapolsky's book that I've thus far read, pretty much in the opposite direction of his thesis in the book. But to my eyes just as convincing.
No, this is a generalization. Without getting into a discussion on determinism you can call a "choice" a decision that a person is able to ponder, discuss, explain.
People can be temporarily pushed out of the ability to make rational decisions in many ways. Examples abound.
Correction: Examples infinite. If you're going to venture anywhere outside the realm of split-second fight-or-flight behavior such as with drug addiction or suicide, then you can rationalize anything as out of your control. You can also choose to take responsibility for your own actions; and let others take responsibility for theirs, rather than trying to rationalize away their agency, or yours.
