Recently I was on flight in which a passenger had a medical emergency - not a terribly unusual occurrence. The crew called for a doctor and a medical student revealed himself. The passenger - now patient - settled at the front of the plane and the med student treated him until the pilot made an emergency landing. Then the passenger was whisked off in a stretcher while the rest of us wondered what was wrong with him.
What does this have to do with economics? The situation is best conceived as production-side externality. In the course of generating a doctor, a hospital has been shuffling that med student from paying customer to paying customer. Yet my plane's passenger was able to take advantage of the process and gain medical care for free! If we want the allocatively-efficient number of medical students on planes, it may be time for hospitals to deploy them with pocket credit card scanners.
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