The trouble with giving doctors complete control over doctor education is that in the US they've used that control to restrict the supply of doctors to keep the price of doctors high.
Right now it’s congress that is restricting the supply of doctors. The AMA’s (which only represents about 15% of doctors btw) current position is that we need more doctors and they have been actively lobbying congress to provide funding for more residency slots.
The AMA lobbied for the freeze in slots in the 90s. Their change of heart today doesn't make them less responsible for creating the mess, in the name of protecting physician salaries, in the first place.
The AMA lobbied for a freeze in slots because the rate of growth had was increasing and extrapolating from that it looked like more physicians would be graduating than there would be jobs for them to fill.
The number of physicians has been growing faster than population growth since the 60s. No one could have predicted that we’d be able to sustain the insane growth in medical spending and demand that allowed this to continue.
Because of the way medical training is funded, number of physicians isn’t not a free market phenomenon. Congress decides how many there are. In the 90s it looked like there were going to be too many. When that changed the AMAs position changed, it was a perfectly reasonable position.
But even if it weren’t a reasonable position. That was 30 years ago. No one who was in a position of power is around today, so it’s unclear to me how exactly the current AMA should bear responsibility.
It would be like if IEEE today called for a temporary freeze on the increase of H-1Bs. Then 30 years later something causes an explosion in demand for engineers and people started blaming these evil engineers.
