Matching Medical Mayhem
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/16/why-your-waiter-has-an-m-d/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)
This article demonstrates an example of how perfect matching may cause in matching medical school graduates to have problems finding residency positions across the United States. Every year, medical schools have a match date to match their medical students to residency programs across the United States. Sam in this case, a medical school graduate was unable to be matched to a residency program, due to the number of available residencies being smaller than the number of graduates. This shows that the medical school students form a constricted set compared to the set of residency positions, as there can be no perfect matching between the two sets because there size is different.
The article asks why hasn’t the number of available residencies increased then if there are more medical students? Federal government’s inability to provide funding for medicare (especially now with the closing of the government’s due to its failure to come to an agreement over funding for Obamacare) will now lead to less students being able secure residencies. In my opinion, this could even lead to lower rates of acceptances for medical schools, as there will not be enough residency positions made for the later graduating classes of medical schools, so medical schools will take fewer applicants while the size of the applicant pool increases due to the desirability of entering the medical field.
Another point to note is how mechanics of the matching system works. When matches are being set up, students send out a “rank-order list” to a centralized matching service. Residency programs do the same to this service. This is similar to how in markets, buyers have different values for items, but in this case, it’s almost that the items also have different values for buyers, and we are trying to maximize the overall happiness or value of the market by matching certain buyers with items. However, certain buyers, or medical students, are neglected and are not able to take an item off the market. Interestingly history has shown that there has been an increase in the rate of total medical students matched over the past 30 years. However the idea of matching medical students to a number of positions that is less than the total of them seems to be an issue that medical schools must adjust. Getting into medical school and studying for an additional four years should have a great, if only positive, net value.