I will admit that I didn't bother to read their infographic (not interested in their school at all and didn't check out their website besides the article). Their theory was more about the number of AOA spots available now that the merge happened.
The wrench in their calculations seems to be that more DO schools are opening and I don't think they acknowledged that. I think they assumed the number of DO is fixed, so they came up with a quantifiable number 895). Not sure how accurate that is. As you mentioned, the Step 1 becoming P/F is another concern.
This is the info I'm referring to:
The AOA match in 2017 was only
71% overall. To that end, half DO students that matched into residencies at all went to NRMP residencies (50%), not DO programs. They're already "here." Furthermore, of the 3109 residencies exclusively available to DO students, only 2,214 were even filled. Last year, there were 895 DO residencies that went unfilled. If those 895 maintain their accreditation as residencies through the new match, and they likely will, that's an additional
895 residencies that are now open to MD students that were previously unavailable
and went unfilled.
For context, the current General Medical Education bill (GME) funds the addition of 3,000 new residency slots each year across the US between 2015 and 2019 as a means of alleviating the physician shortage. The 895 unfilled spots
alone are effectively a 29% bonus for MDs on top of that 2019 funding boost at no additional cost to taxpayers or hospitals.