More doctors, better health? Consolidating evidence from Brazil's Mais Médicos program

In their paper "More Doctors, better health? A generalised synthetic control approach to estimating impacts of increasing doctors under Brazil's Mais Medicos Programme", Thomas, Millett, Soares and Hone add novel empirical evidence on the effects of Brazil's Programa Mais Medicos (PMM) on population health outcomes, reinforcing evidence that PMM has had limited effects: while PMM improved healthcare access in underserved regions, results show little impact on more extreme outcomes, such as mortality. Here I collect and connect evidence from the Brazilian context to discuss three potential explanations that, inter alia, could help us better understand why evidence from Thomas et al. (2024) as well as from previous research efforts points to a weak relationship between physician supply and population health. The potential explanations include health production complexity, system adaptability, and the increasing challenge of managing chronic diseases, emphasizing the need for more integrated healthcare approaches.