"The U.S. has low medical productivity, which makes it very difficult for patients to see a doctor in a growing population. On the other hand, Korea has very high medical productivity, making it very easy for patients to see a doctor with a shrinking population."

An engineer, not a doctor, said so in a rebuttal to media reports that the American Medical Association (AMA) is calling for more doctors.

Sung Won-yong, a professor of electrical and information engineering at Seoul National University specializing in speech recognition and artificial neural networks, expressed on social media on Monday that Korea and the United States find themselves in contrasting situations.

"Expanding the number of medical school students means depleting talent in other fields," Professor Sung wrote in a column, criticizing the government's push for increasing medical school quotas as a populist policy.

"I oppose the increase in physicians because I have experienced hospitals in several countries," Sung said, sharing his experience of waiting a long time and paying a lot of money to see a doctor in America. According to the OECD's health statistics in 2023, there are 2.7 clinical physicians per 1,000 people in the U.S. and 2.6 in Korea. The OECD average is 3.7.

"The reason it's harder for people in the U.S., New Zealand, and the U.K. to see a doctor is primarily due to low physician productivity," Sung said. "Korean doctors have to see dozens of patients in a short time because they are underpaid. They are paid by the number of patients they see."

Sung cited that in October, a Johns Hopkins University professor who attended the BioCAS 2023 Conference in Toronto, Canada, said that "low medical productivity" is the biggest problem in the U.S. healthcare system.

"The government's argument for expanding medical school students is to grow and use them as interns and residents. If there are not enough residents in the university hospitals, we need to raise the price and use more doctors," Sung said. “We need to see if there is enough medical demand in Korea when these people finish their residency and open a hospital."

However, he said the demand for medical care in Korea is not high enough to accommodate the additional doctors after they become specialists. Because of the already high productivity, the total amount of medical care is oversupplied, and Korea is a country where the population falls, Sung noted.

"The logic of 'doctor shortage' as the basis for increasing the medical school enrollment quota is not in line with the actual situation in Korea," Sung also wrote in an article for a media outlet on Nov. 2, noting that the number of hospital visits per capita in Korea is more than twice as high as the average in developed countries and higher than in Japan.

"Although we are aging, there is no reason we cannot ride the wave of aging with the current medical workforce, considering that the overall population is not increasing and AI and medical technology are developing rapidly," Sung said. "Rather, the Moon Jae-in administration's health insurance policy, Mooncare, and the recent accidental loss insurance have encouraged medical overconsumption and uncompensated care, leading to the gap in essential medical care we are currently facing."