Thanks To State Control, Doctors Have Become Gods

 From the founding of the American Medical Association in 1847 to 1900, the number of medical schools more than tripled.

While the report was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation, "​Flexner's report was virtually written in advance by high officials of the American Medical Association, and its advice was quickly taken by every state in the Union," Murray Rothbard explained in Making Economic Sense.

Using the Flexner Report as a guide, the AMA was able to use the state to cartelize the medical industry.

The result: every medical school and hospital was subjected to licensing by the state, which would turn the power to appoint licensing boards over to the state AMA. The state was supposed to, and did, put out of business all medical schools that were proprietary and profit-making, that admitted blacks and women, and that did not specialize in orthodox, "Allopathic" medicine: particularly homeopaths, who were then a substantial part of the medical profession, and a respectable alternative to orthodox allopathy.

In all cases of cartels, the producers are able to replace consumers in their seats of power, and accordingly the medical establishment was now able to put competing therapies out of business; to remove disliked competing groups from the supply of physicians; and to replace proprietary medical schools financed by student fees with university-based schools run by the faculty, and subsidized by foundations and wealthy donors.

The burgeoning cartel meant "a skewing of the entire medical profession away from patient care toward high-tech, high-capital investment in rare and glamorous diseases," wrote Rothbard, "Which redound far more to the prestige of the hospital and its medical staff than is actually useful for the patient-consumers."

Abraham Flexner, according to Starr, "Had an aristocratic disdain for things commercial." The high-minded Flexner Report "More successfully legitimated the profession's interest in limiting the number of medical schools and the supply of physicians than anything the AMA might have put out on its own." 

https://mises.org/mises-wire/thanks-state-control-doctors-have-become-gods