I am currently suffering from a torn Achilles tendon and the medical system in Palo Alto responded instantly (2hr walk-in care wait) on Saturday and with a 7am MRI and 10:45 a.m. follow-up appointment on Monday
This is a stupid conspiracy theory. A very brief check shows the average salary of a doctor in the US is less than $200k annually. The AMA does not have the authority over licensing of doctors to restrict anything.
Deregulating medicine can easily be shown to be a disaster in the making... since the Reagan years, regulations on health care have been relaxed like most other limits placed on corporations and it's led to poor quality care, the highest health care spending in the world, and rent seeking middlemen pocketing billions.
Health care in the US needs to be a government provided single payer system.
Here's a place to start... a list of the top 10 hospital systems in the US:
https://www.definitivehc.com/blog/top-10-largest-health-syst...
Hospital systems are mostly following the same path as other corporations have, merging and acquiring until there are only a few dominant firms, at which point those firms will have the market in a death grip.
There are clinics and small partnerships where doctors are part owners, but they're a tiny minority in the US. For the most part, to be a doctor in the US you have to have admitting privileges at a hospital.
Until 2014 there was some competition in this with Doctors of Osteopathy, who had their own residency accreditation, but then they merged them, presumably so that they wouldn't start cranking out a bunch of DOs and devalue the profession.
This is not the AMA directly, but the AMA is one of the members of the ACGME.
As they should be. The largest association of doctors in the US SHOULD have a say in what constitutes a standard medical residency program in the US.
The idea that health care is expensive because hidden organizations are limiting the number of doctors in the US is a stupid conspiracy theory, period. Health care in the US is expensive because of out of control corporations that have been less and less regulated by anyone in the past 50 years.
This is just like calling OPEC a stupid conspiracy theory.
You shop at a drugstore, does that mean you're part of the Big Pharma cabal?
Medicare and Medicaid are subsidized by a shadow tax on working people. Commercial insurance, like the majority of readers of this website get through their employers, pays roughly double the cost per procedure as Medicare and Medicaid. Your health premiums would be lower if we all paid the same price, but your taxes would be higher.
>Medicare and Medicaid are subsidized by a shadow tax on working people.
Straight out of the GOP list of talking points. Are you upset that your "hard earned dollars" are going to people who don't deserve them?
It's right there on the damn W2, how is that a "shadow" tax?
>Commercial insurance, ..., pays roughly double the cost per procedure as Medicare and Medicaid.
And also every other developed country! Why is "the average american or their health plan pays double everyone else" a good thing?
>Your health premiums would be lower if we all paid the same price, but your taxes would be higher.
Also laughable. Somehow our citizens pay way more than anyone else in the world, and largely don't have better life expediencies (women giving birth in america die shockingly often!). We pay more into private healthcare systems than the rest of the world pays into public systems.
I like taxes, with them I buy civilization. I want my taxes to go up, and my medical premiums to go away. Covering everyone is simply more economically efficient in aggregate vs the current Rube Goldberg system design, where the US spends more on healthcare than every other OECD country for worse outcomes.
Furthermore speaking from personal experience it's not like Medicare is some panacea of needing care -> getting care. That system is full of its own rules limiting what it'll cover, reams of paperwork to justify things as medically necessary, etc. It only seems better because everyone is used to dealing with it and denials seem less opaque, but it's still ultimately rooted in top-down paternalism and controlling care, rather than patient-focused incentives.
Expanding the present medicare system without massive changes not only be likely to decrease the quality of care but would be horrifically inefficient.
The US needs a rework of its health care system from the Federal level down, probably using something like the South Korean system as a model (which notably is NOT socialized medicine).
Are you implying that only software engineers should make $500k/yr?
By the time a medical doctor completes training, she's nearly 30 years old, having made slave wages thus far, and now stuck with a few $100k+ of student loan debt. Don't forget malpractice insurance, overhead costs, etc.
Compare that to your average CS tech graduate who's making $200k+ at age 21 which they then spend on Teslas and ticky-tacky apartments.