Comment by tptacek

Start here:

https://www.hrsa.gov/sites/default/files/hrsa/advisory-commi...

It's weird to hear someone in medicine say this, because it was a big deal at the time and it comes up in many health care economics discussions (it's a commonly stated reason we can't just make more medical schools to create more doctors, and in that way bring the cost of medical education down). And: if you feel that physicians are alienated from the AMA, OK, why are you defending the AMA?

"Single payer" can't be the reason doctors make more here, because they make far less in systems like Germany which aren't single payer. There's a really widespread misconception on the left in the US that "universal care" elsewhere in the world automatically connotes "single payer", but most universal systems aren't single payer.

A quick caution: if you write to me as if I'm a defender of the US system, you're going to miss me consistently, because I am not that. I just think the reflexive position that the answer to our problems is to universalize medicare is bad policy. We could do guaranteed issue, community rating, price transparency, and means-tested subsidy and land essentially where Germany is without essentially ratifying permanently the perverse protectionist premium paid to providers.