[jjackson5324]

I don’t know about other countries but that’s absolutely the case for the US.

The culprit is the AMA.

> In the 20th century, the AMA has frequently lobbied to restrict the supply of physicians, contributing to a doctor shortage in the United States.[10][11][12] The organization has also lobbied against allowing physician assistants and other health care providers to perform basic forms of health care. The organization has historically lobbied against various of government-run health insurance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association

[lumb63]

Milton Friedman discusses this in depth in his book Free to Choose (from the 1980s), for anyone who’s interested. Here we are 40 years later, problem still unsolved.

[data_maan]

Wow.. amazing

[thaumasiotes]

Obviously, they are a big problem, but they're not the only problem. It is received wisdom among doctors that increasing the number of doctors causes medical costs to go up, and it is generally also the position of the state.

The doctors are simply wrong; the state is correct from a pernicious point of view.

Because the state is responsible for buying so much of the total supply of medical care, they generally view things from the perspective of "how much are we spending on the category 'medical care'?", rather than the perspective of how much any given treatment costs.

Increasing the number of doctors lowers the cost of all treatments and is unambiguously good.

However, it does raise the total amount of medical spending, which, in the eyes of the state, is bad.

[jjackson5324]

So you’re saying that increasing the number of doctors will result in more medical services being consumed which means higher costs for the gov?

That’s the view of the government?

[lazide]

Think of it like increasing lanes in a highway. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox]

Or induced demand.

That said, likely individual medical outcomes would be better.

Large scale systems tend to produce… odd behaviors.

[thaumasiotes]

Yes.