It's not common sense

(This is a follow-up to my post about Duncan Watt's book. I hope to make it recurring.)

Some doctors wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about how to solve the primary care doctor shortage. In short, they think too many doctors are becoming specialists and too few are working in primary care. They propose to fix this by taking away the (roughly) $200,000 subsidy for learning a specialty.

That sounds like common sense. If you don't want so many specialists then stop paying $200,000 to encourage people to become one. But if you read the article you'll see the authors take hundreds of words to articulate this idea. The authors are doctors so they aren't idiots. The insight took years of research and hundreds of carefully edited words because it's NOT common sense.