Over the past two decades, a wide gap in pay has arisen between medica

Question

Over the past two decades, a wide gap in pay has arisen between medical professionals who practice in the public health arena as opposed to those who practice privately. As a result, many doctors, nurses and other health professionals employed by public and nonprofit agencies have left their public health jobs in favor of private clinics and hospitals. Public and nonprofit agencies will be able to entice these professionals to return to public health jobs if salaries are made commensurate with those paid in the private sector. The quality of medical care provided by public and nonprofit agencies will thus be improved.

Which one of the following is presumed in the position stated above?

(A) The experience obtained by medical professionals in private clinics and hospitals will be especially important in the public health arena.

(B) How well public and nonprofit health agencies perform depends for the most part upon the experience level of their health professionals.

(C) Unless public and nonprofit health agencies act, the salaries paid to medical professionals in private practice will continue to outpace those paid in the public health arena.

(D) Medical health professionals who moved from the public sector to the private sector would change jobs again.

(E) If the pay disparity between the public and private medical sectors continues to increase, many doctors and nurses will move from private practice to the public health area.

Hatakekakashi · Answer

premise - because of salary gap people move from public to private and if the salary are similar then people will join public again

The clear assumption is in D - people who moved from public to private would change jobs (if they don't change then the conclusion wouldn't stand)

(D) imo

Regards, 
HK

Bunuel · Answer

Official Explanation

Don’t ponder too long over this question. The answer is fairly simple. The question presumes that medical professionals who left their jobs in the public health sector for higher paying private jobs would return to the public health sector if salaries go up enough.  (D) is the correct choice.

Students often assume the LSAT will contain only difficult questions because it has the reputation of being a difficult test. But the LSAT contains questions with a wide range of difficulty levels, from easy to very difficult. Students are often bewildered when they read a fairly easy question and find an obvious answer in the selections available. They believe they might have missed something, and often try to make the question more difficult than it is. When one of the selections seems too self-evident, then perhaps it is. However, because the LSAT questions do vary tremendously by difficulty level, perhaps the obvious answer to a simple question is correct.

If a question bothers you for this reason, don’t become obsessed with discovering what you have missed in the question. Perhaps you haven’t missed anything and the obvious answer is the correct choice. If you carefully read back through the question and selections and don’t find anything you missed the first time, select your answer and go on with the next LSAT question. You might want to mark that question somehow in the margin so that you can come back to it if you have time after you complete the exam.

lakshya14 · Answer

Between (A) and (D), (D) seems to repeat what premise says whereas (A) tells us about the conclusion?  AndrewN

RajatJ79 · Answer

There are 2 positions stated in the above passage:
1.  Public and nonprofit agencies will be able to entice these professionals to return to public health jobs if salaries are made commensurate with those paid in the private sector.

2.  The quality of medical care provided by public and nonprofit agencies will thus be improved.

I was focused on the latter position, the one about quality of care and that's how I ended up marking Option A when it came down to selecting between Option A or D.

GMATNinja   VeritasKarishma  : how can I avoid such a situation, going forward?

Posted from my mobile device

KarishmaB · Answer

Public vs private - big money difference
Many professionals have left public and gone to private
If salaries are made comparable, the professionals will be enticed to return
Quality of medical care provided by public sector will be improved

To establish the above, what is presumed?

(A) The experience obtained by medical professionals in private clinics and hospitals will be especially important in the public health arena.

The argument doesn't talk about less or more experience anywhere. It just says that let's get those "professionals" back to improve quality. Will the experience gained by them while in private sector help? We don't know.

(B) How well public and nonprofit health agencies perform depends for the most part upon the experience level of their health professionals.

Again, as we discussed above, "experience" is not being considered in the argument. We lost many professionals because they were being paid less; now we just want them back by giving them higher salaries. This will help improve quality.

(C) Unless public and nonprofit health agencies act, the salaries paid to medical professionals in private practice will continue to outpace those paid in the public health arena.

Will private salaries continue to outpace pubic salaries in future, we don't know.

(D) Medical health professionals who moved from the public sector to the private sector would change jobs again.

We are claiming that if we raise salaries in public sector, quality of public sector will improve. So we are assuming that the professionals will change their jobs again and come back. Correct.

(E) If the pay disparity between the public and private medical sectors continues to increase, many doctors and nurses will move from private practice to the public health area.

Incorrect. If pay disparity continues, it is likely that more professionals will move from public to private sector but in any case, we cannot say what will happen in the future.

Answer (D)

AndrewN · Answer

Hello,  lakshya14 . I will admit that when I read the passage, I thought the assumption might be that  higher-quality   doctors, nurses, and other health professionals  were leaving the public sector in favor of the private sector, but that was not an answer choice. You will note that the passage simply states that  many  health professionals have jumped ship, so to speak, and made the switch. I thought the passage conflated higher salaries with higher quality, but so much for pre-thinking. I did still go with (D), though, and I wanted to discuss (A) more in depth in hopes that you will understand what rules it out.

First off, the  experience  referred to is that which has come exclusively from time spent in private practice, completely ignoring any experience the health professionals may have had prior to leaving the public sphere. The passage drives at luring more professionals—through salary incentives—back to the public domain to improve  the quality of medical care , but nowhere does it indicate that the experience gained within their private practice will be a crucial component to such an improvement. So, can we call such experience  especially important ? I would say no.

Meanwhile, (D) is a valid assumption. The reason provided for health professionals leaving the public sphere to begin with is the  wide gap in pay . Since the passage goes on to argue that decreasing that pay gap would  entice these professionals to return to public health jobs , we have to assume that such professionals would actually be willing to switch back to public practice for the argument to hold that  the quality of medical care provided by public and nonprofit agencies will thus be improved . Choice (D) is not a simple restatement of what the passage says. There is still a missing link between the offer of more money and improved public healthcare. (That is, just because something is enticing, we cannot say that it will succeed in luring its target.)

I hope that helps. Pardon the later response, but I was running behind yesterday.

- Andrew

Gilmore · Answer

Hello,

I have gone through the explanations shared for this question, and I now understand why Answer Choice D is correct.

I initially chose C because I thought that, unless public and nonprofit agencies raise salaries, the pay gap would continue to widen. Since the agencies are offering higher salaries specifically to reduce that disparity, I assumed that continued wage growth in the private sector was necessary for the argument. However, I now realise that this was not something the stimulus presumed—I brought in outside information to justify the answer.

What I struggled with was determining which conclusion or position in the argument I should focus on when evaluating assumptions. Initially, I treated the final sentence—"The quality of medical care provided by public and nonprofit agencies will thus be improved"—as the main conclusion. Because of that, I eliminated answer choices that were not directly related to quality of care and focused mainly on A and B. Later, I realised that those were not good assumptions and shifted my attention to the claim about attracting professionals back to public health jobs.

My confusion stemmed from the fact that both of these statements seemed to be conclusions, and neither appeared to be explicitly supported by evidence within the argument. As a result, I found it difficult to determine which claim I should evaluate when looking for the required assumption.

To avoid making similar mistakes in the future, do you have any advice on how to identify the correct conclusion or focal point of an argument when there appear to be multiple unsupported conclusions?

Thank you!

Over the past two decades, a wide gap in pay has arisen between medica

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