Behind The Knife: The Surgery Podcast

The House Judiciary Committee just dropped a 47-page report calling the National Residency Match Program a hiring monopoly that harms patients, doctors, and the public — and the surgical community is talking. In this episode, Dr. Patrick Georgoff is joined by BTK surgical education fellows Dr. Emma Burke and Dr. Agnes Prem Kumar, along with special guest Dr. Brian Carmody (aka the Sheriff of Sodium), a pediatric nephrologist and one of the sharpest analysts of medical education policy working today. Together, they break down the report's central claims: that the NRMP exercises monopolistic control over residency hiring, suppresses resident wages, and strips trainees of bargaining power — and they separate what the report gets right from where its rhetoric badly outruns its evidence. From the history of Section 207 and the antitrust lawsuit that nearly brought down academic medicine, to the real economics of GME funding, resident unionization, and what a match-free world would actually look like — this is the