If more doctors could open practices, there'd be more choice for consumers.
I mean really, why do we even let the AMA -- doctors themselves -- artificially limit the supply of doctors? Of course they are going to keep the numbers low. 11,000 (the last number I found) new doctors every year is simply NOT enough. It may be a little bit higher, but last I researched, for years it was 10,000 and only after a lot of controversy did they increase it to 11,000.
The system is designed to force doctors into debt so they have to be money focused and charge a lot and keep rates high for all the other doctors. The doctors, many of whom are my long time friends, are not happy with the system. They want more freedom. They feel like slaves to debt. One good friend left grad school with over $250,000 in debt! It takes a long time to pay that off. She can't take on more debt to open a private practice, nor would she have the experience really -- she's forced into the big hospital system that she knows is flawed, but she's powerless to change it because the huge medical institutions call the shots, not the doctors. We think doctors are invincible and make tons of money, but if they lose their jobs -- it's a horrible experience, because it'll be very difficult for them to find another job -- doctors talk and bankruptcy doesn't clear student loan debt, so even that isn't an option.
Add to that, the fact that individuals aren't even allowed to care for their own medical well being and you have a system that is way unfairly balanced toward doctors and away from patients. Not even the doctors really, the hospitals.
Why, in the "leader of the free world" are individuals not free to care for themselves? Prescribe their own medications? Order their own labs and CAT scans and the like?
Why do we give the AMA so much power? Why don't patients have any over their own lives?
I suppose patients do have some power -- over the doctors. There are doctors out there who send patients with viruses out with antibiotics because the patient wants something. They prescribe drugs from tv commercials because the patient wants something. Why do we let them do this? There should be laws against prescribing antibiotics for people who don't have bacterial infections. I know that and I'm not a doctor, but doctors still do it.
There's really something wrong with our system. It's completely irrational. There's simply too much money in it and people go crazy.