It's not about relaxing standards, it's about not wasting the time and talent of a potential doctor so educators get paid to teach useless classes. Kids who have the potential to go to med school can be identified pretty early. Why waste a kids time with PE and art class? We waste what 1/2 of high school and undergrad with stuff that doesn't help and at the undergrad level represents 40 or 50 k in additional costs for nothing. That's not catering to the c student, that's attracting the type of high level stem talent that's currently being diverted to other sectors.

Also, the process needs to be open to more non linear career paths given that the person meets certain standards. One of the pioneers of cardiothorasic surgery was a guy named Vivienne Thomas. He lost his tuition in the bank failures in the depression and was forced to work as a janitor then a lab technician. After being self taught he was literally coaching licensed surgeons through the first surgeries redirecting the subclavian artery and was later made an instructor of surgical procedure at Johns Hopkins but wasn't allowed, at the time of his innovation, to actually perform the surgical techniques that he literally invented.

That's somewhat of an extreme example but at current there are a lot of candidates that choose other fields not because of lack of aptitude but because they may not have 1/4 million dollars or want to wait until their early thirties to start a family.

Milton friedman talked extensively about the role of the AMA in limiting the # of doctors, medical institutions and ittiration of practice to inflate the wages of its members. This is true of almost any union or Association. This is achieved through accreditation, licensure, and apprenticeship arrangements. In a true market economy, the performance history and credentials of any service provider inform the demand for the consumer, but we don't need a third party bureaucracy with perverse incentives to offer us a rubber stamp, simply the access to the information.

So in reality, the excesses in the artaficial truncation of the supply of medical talent causes us all to pay more for the same or lower quality of care than we would otherwise be able to find on our own. It also greatly limits the innovation in the kinds of practices developed because it insulates the service provider from actually having to compete based on cost to the consumer once we clear all of the hoops.

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