The Island of Doctor Hayek

For the third homework assignment I asked my principle of microeconomics students the following question:

Suppose anyone could legally practice medicine regardless of their educational background. Keeping the ideas of emergent order in mind, explain the implications of such a change. Would this change be desirable or undesirable? Explain why or why not.

The vast majority (about 70%) claimed this would be, "of course," disastrous. It reminded me of F.A. Hayek's observation:

Much of the opposition to a system of freedom under general laws arises from the inability to conceive of an effective co-ordination of human activities without deliberate organization by a commanding intelligence.

To see what I mean, here's a sampling of the responses:

...there would be a significant decline due to a lack of knowledge ad resources to apply appropriate medical treatment. This would cause a decrease in recovery, trust in the medical professionals, an increase in malpractice suits, and inappropriate treatment...

The quality of healthcare would plummet. The doctors [sic] offices would be jam packed with people who may not even need medical attention.

Without medical schools people would learn how to practice medicine directly from other doctors....without the proper tests and knowledge from medical school many doctors may be ill-informed and overall perform more poorly than they would of if they learned all the rules and regulations from medical school.

There's no doubt, as I mentioned to the class, that decentralized order is messy. In this case, people will surely suffer and even die by the hand of someone with less knowledge than a typical doctor. But so much of the chaos mentioned here wouldn't happen. The danger of medical malpractice and the desire to get a good doctor will make true quacks few and far between. A "jam packed" waiting room would encourage entry or prices would increase. Medical schools would still exist and, because good doctors are still in demand, people would still attend. More might attend because you don't need to finish to practice medicine.

Most of the reasons people go to a doctor are routine concerns. Do you really need a veteran doctor to give you a physical? Or tell you that you have the flu? You're either wasting his time or spending too much on him. As Arnold Kling argues, this "Crisis of Abundance" is one of the big reasons health care costs are so high. You don't need experts on every little cough and sneeze.

Yet students rarely mentioned any benefits such deregulation would bring and some mentioned the lower salary of doctors as a negative (though in reality only the bad doctors would see their wages fall, as per the compensating wage differential, a concept that was covered in the question right before this one).

It's not obvious if this institutional change is desirable or undesirable. But the relative metric is comparing the costs of the risk and additional suffering thanks to quacks with the benefits of getting the same job done for less. And since the costs are temporary and rare (bad doctors don't last long) and the benefits are permanent, I personally lean to the favorable interpretation.