I think you are confusing supply with demand. Demand is when someone has a problem they need treatment for. Supply is when there is a doctor who can do the work. You don’t increase supply by increasing the need for neurosurgery. That increases demand. The way to increase supply is to increase the number of doctors.
Our government for some reason thinks that the supply and demand will not balance unless some government bureaucrat makes it balance, so they are constantly adjusting supply by adopting policies designed to reduce (or increase) the number of doctors. For the last 60 years, they’ve always aimed to reduce the number of doctors, not increase them, and that is the source of our shortage for the most part, though I admit that the tort law is also a big part of the problem. A large part of the stress doctors have is that they are overworked because there are not enough of them, and they are expected to spend virtually no time on each patient because there aren’t enough of them.
At the same time, the government has policies that are designed to adjust demand for healthcare. They’ve got subsidies to encourage people to buy more healthcare. They’ve got bureaucrats who decide when people have been getting too much healthcare. Frankly, how much people spend on healthcare is none of their business, though.
In a free market, patients decide how much they are going to spend on healthcare, and what services they are going to obtain, with the advice of their doctors. Doctors decide whether they are willing to work for the price that the patient is willing to pay. When those two things coincide, you have a procedure.
That doesn’t bear much similarity to reality because we don’t have a free market in this area. Despite the fact that it is government that has been manipulating both supply and demand for decades, they blame the mess they’ve created on the “free market.” Their ain’t no free market in this case. The mess we’ve got was caused by government. And you’re not going to fix that problem with more government.
I do think that they could alleviate the problem to some degree by tort reform, but the biggest thing they could do is increase the number of medical schools and the capacity of existing medical schools. Our medical education system does not have the capacity to produce the number of doctors we need. You could build a whole lot of medical schools for a tiny fraction of a percent of what Pelosi wants to spend on socialized medicine.
I’m not sure we are really in disagreement here.