[swatcoder]

I don't get the vitriol or where you assume I see doctors as "greedy" or determined to "screw over their patients". I assume you've read a lot of stuff here that gets under your skin, and that my post somehow reminds you of those. But you read a lot of things into it that I didn't write and wouldn't write.

Doctors are brilliant individuals and often deeply invested in patient care. Many if not most of them pursued the career because they wanted to be healers. But as you beautifully describe, a lot of their actual job is now committed to navigating endless bureaucracy because they are the only people who have been institutionally blessed to do so. Given that many of them do care so much about patients on a personal level, and pursued the field for that reason, it's tragic that paperwork takes so much away from their opportunity to do so.

My perspective even goes so far as to argue that their pay isn't a product of greed at all, but simply a necessary outcome of institutionally mediated medical goods, of which they've been tasked as front-line guardian, being grossly expensive. Reduce the cost of what they control access to, as we see in non-US health care markets, and their pay naturally reduces.

In lieu of that, the US solution is to cleave out the responsibilities that don't require 8+ years of education and residency to get right and allow them to be dispensed by others.

There's no indictment of doctors here, friend. None at all. It's all just mechanisms in a system much much bigger than them, and these mechanisms (as you describe!) frustrate them at least as much as anyone else.