If I trained at a community hospital in Nepal, am I going to need US residency standards? We don’t know. That’s why we have standard board exams and admission pathways that all US physicians need to follow. We should not compromise on that.
We can expand US MD and US DO schools and fill our thousands of unfilled Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, and Pediatric Subspecialty residency slots first!
"Why should a surgeon with 20 years of experience working in Mumbai be forced to become a resident alongside fresh-faced med school grads in the US?"
Perhaps you could have them in some accelerated program, but i think it makes a lot of sense to require doctors to train or prove themselves in the specific country/region using the standard practices, tools, etc customary there. I wouldn't want a US doctor operating on me in India since they're likely to make assumptions and recommendations for treatment that overlook local practices, resources, etc.
Board exams are fine. You can sit thousands of candidates for those. The issue is residency slots which are the main bottleneck. Why should a surgeon with 20 years of experience working in Mumbai be forced to become a resident alongside fresh-faced med school grads in the US? It’s a huge problem when it’s cheaper and safer to fly to India for surgery than to get the same surgery in the US (from a less experienced surgeon).
It’s the tyranny of the status quo. Milton Friedman was complaining about this more than 50 years ago.
[1] https://youtu.be/UmVrfbfKBIk