Reply #21: Correct, but the solution there isn't to make physician pay unsustainable like it is now. The

[BzaDem]

solution is to lower medical school costs. If the AMA didn't artificially constrain the supply of medical schools (and therefore doctors), med school would be cheaper and the supply of doctors would be larger (resulting in lower pay for them). In reality, pay will still need to be further controlled by the government even after such a reform (as it is in every other modern industrialized nation), and medical school will need to be subsidized, but such a reform is a necessary first step.

I'm not claiming doctors are "greedy," anymore than anyone in any other profession is greedy. The truth is that in the aggregate, prices are set to optimize profit. Even if you or others voluntarily set your prices lower than you can to optimize profit (as some undoubtedly do), this does not happen in the aggregate, which is why doctors (and drug companies/medical device manufacturers/hospitals/etc) are paid in this country far more than in any other country.

Most markets have competition and non-necessity to counteract unchecked increasing prices, but medicine by and large doesn't have either. It is a different type of market than other markets and it needs to be treated as such (as it is in other nations). This is not the fault of doctors -- this is simply due to the lack of mechanisms in the medicine market to counteract unchecked price increases (described in post 5). It's microeconomics more than anything else. Any market with the properties of the market for medicine would have this problem.

The result of what I'm talking about would not result in doctors getting paid less than other countries -- in fact they would likely continue to be paid higher than other countries (just not the level they are right now). The alternative is quite simply national bankruptcy -- medical costs simply cannot keep increasing at three times the rate of inflation. That is mathematically impossible -- something has to give.