The problem of doctors’ salaries
yeah, 100% you do this and, shock, you’ll get a LOT fewer people willing to subject themselves to the hell that is medical school and (especially) residency, driving supply back down again.
it’s kind of insane to me that someone would notice “health care costs more in America than other countries!” and get from there to “doctors’ salaries are the real problem” and not the INSANELY HUGE disparity in procedure costs brought on as a direct result of our fucked-up insurance system.
like, sure, yes, doctors do get paid “too much,” but given how much worse those same insurance/liability complications are making their quality of life and reducing the inherent satisfaction of what’s supposed to be Meaningful Work, if you attack that symptom first you’re gonna fuck the whole situation up a lot worse.
To be totally cold-blooded about this: doctor supply is not a thing we need to be worried about, basically no matter what we do. We could cut salaries in half, and make med school even more hellish than it already is, and we’d still have way more than enough doctor candidates to meet our needs. It’s a high-status, high-paying job that comes with more psychic rewards than almost anything else. There is basically infinite supply in the market.
Now, that said, I have (like you) some desire that things should be good rather than bad for doctors. They’re people too, and (like everyone else) they probably do their best work if they’re basically happy and not miserably stressed, and you probably get a better class of doctor if medicine is overall a better deal.
But there are a lot of potential equilibria here, and I think that most of the good outcomes grow out of the “doctoring is easier and lower-stress and lower-paying, we have a lot more and more-specialized medical professionals than we do now, this is less of an elite cartel thing” kind of equilibria.