Salaries are a red herring. So are the number of physicians per se. We don't have a physician shortage per se, we have a provider shortage, and more generally,

Salaries are a red herring. So are the number of physicians per se. We don't have a physician shortage per se, we have a provider shortage, and more generally, we have a healthcare provision shortage. What you really want to know is, if you deregulated healthcare in general, and removed a lot of the medical licensing restrictions around care provision, what would be the expected decrease in healthcare costs? What if you increased care access? For example, let's say you dramatically opened access to large classes of drugs that are basically safe, and made various procedures and medicines available through, say, pharmacists or psychologists, or created opportunities for different provider models that don't exist now. What would be the expected decrease in cost, both in absolute dollar amounts and in "intangibles" such as time? For me the problem is this hierarchical view of healthcare provision, where we assume a physician is omnicient and omniskilled in all areas of medicine, more so than other types of providers who specialize more, and the only safe training path is bachelors -> MD -> residency. I don't buy the safety argument either because having practicing power so concentrated in one professional group also leads to safety problems. Those highly skilled and trained physicians didn't save us from things like the fentanyl crisis, even though it was literally their job under the current paradigm. If someone was really concerned about safety regulation, you would regulate on a skill basis, not on a degree basis. There a whole host of problems in US healthcare, including increasing consolidation of healthcare companies, healthcare management and administration, and so forth. But I do think a hierarchical provider model characterized by intense regulatory capture is a big, nonignorable part of it.