EDIT: > It is already starting to happen and is one way we can reduce the cost of health care.
To the downvoters, I'm replying to this part of the comment, not the overall thread.
Another would be that you don't necessarily have the country's largest industry association behaving like a medieval guild and choking off access to the profession in order to deliberately drive up costs.
Both my wife and I were very much surprised at how much it costs and how many more hurdles one has to overcome to become a doctor in the US. Sure, we would like our brain surgeons and orthopedics to be trained extremely well. But we really don't need 8 years of schooling, 3-8 years of residency+fellowship training on top of many, many exams (Step 1, 2 CK, 2 CS, 3, state licenses) to become a competent doctor. After all, the doctors in the US have to follow the code/guidance set mostly by insurance companies to avoid being sued (meaning, they don't have a lot of leeway to use their intelligence in treating patients; they simply try to not get sued, so they would tell you to get tested on everything possible in order to avoid malpractice lawsuits later, which actually do happen much much higher than in other countries that I know of). The trust between doctors and patients is very, how do I say it, much impersonal and money based.
AMA, test prep companies (Kaplan, UWorld, AMBOSS), residency programs and everyone in the field are (either intentionally or unintentionally) making the bar to entry as high as possible (higher than necessary) to keep the number of doctors available low (my sister who lives in Rochester, NY cannot book a physician for annual check-up until May). India produces plenty of qualified doctors. So does my country (I'd say my country has produced so many doctors for Singapore, Australia and the US; they, like my wife, came to the US and AUS because they can make so much more money here). The field of medicine in the US is paved with money and has become very transactional (I pay you a lot, you'd better treat me and not mess up or else I'll sue you) and impersonal.
1: increase doctor salaries so there can be more doctors and
2: develop things around doctors so their efficiency improves. (Hire assistants, write software, design better hospitals).
>2: develop things around doctors so their efficiency improves. (Hire assistants, write software, design better hospitals).
As for this note, a doctors time is more valuable than basically all 3 of these. If you assume medical corporations desire making more money, then they would already be looking into this step. It's not something that would be improved by increasing the number of customers.
Preventative care is far easier than complex "shit, you've got stage four cancer because you didn't get that lump checked out". For uninsured folks, ERs wind up functioning as primary care, which is immensely wasteful use of resources.
> If you assume medical corporations desire making more money, then they would already be looking into this step.
They are. Some hospitals hire scribes for doctors, for example.