This article makes some bold claims about doctor "cartels", but it seems like the problem lies with Congress' failure to increase funding for residency slots:
> In recent years, the number of medical residents has become so restricted that even the American Medical Association is pushing to have the number of slots increased. The major obstacle at this point is funding. It costs a teaching hospital roughly $150,000 a year for a residency slot. Most of the money comes from Medicare, with a lesser amount from Medicaid and other government sources. The number of slots supported by Medicare has been frozen for two decades after Congress lowered it in 1997 at the request of the American Medical Association and other doctors’ organizations.
Now, I'm sure there are all sorts of unknown details about the relationship between the AMA and congress, but the AMA at least publicly asks for more residency slots, so describing doctors as a cartel seems weird.
According to AHIP (https://www.ahip.org/health-care-dollar/) about 22% of healthcare cost goes to medication, 20% to hospitalization, and the rest goes to doctor visits, medical tests, emergencies and admin.
If the US just improved the public-access clinic network by allowing foreign doctors and nurse practitioners to provide more triaged, 24/7 urgent care, we could save a lot of money on insurance (maybe as much as 25%?)and you could probably leave the rest of the system alone.
In short, we don’t need to see a high-paid physician for most of our healthcare needs. Electronic health records mean that our data is available instantly to any provider.
> In recent years, the number of medical residents has become so restricted that even the American Medical Association is pushing to have the number of slots increased. The major obstacle at this point is funding. It costs a teaching hospital roughly $150,000 a year for a residency slot. Most of the money comes from Medicare, with a lesser amount from Medicaid and other government sources. The number of slots supported by Medicare has been frozen for two decades after Congress lowered it in 1997 at the request of the American Medical Association and other doctors’ organizations.
Now, I'm sure there are all sorts of unknown details about the relationship between the AMA and congress, but the AMA at least publicly asks for more residency slots, so describing doctors as a cartel seems weird.