Government is certainly a big part of the problem, but I blame lawyers and insurance companies more. I live in Texas and we enacted tort reform a few years back that capped how much a jury could award a victim in a malpractice suit. The result is that healthcare costs are lower here because malpractice insurance rates are lower. Another benefit we are deriving from this is that doctors are closing their offices in other parts of the country and re-locating here.
I'm not bragging about any of this, just using it to demonstrate that tort reform WORKS and it boggles the mind that it is NOT part of zero's DeathCare plan!
If you read the article, you can see that under the current 3rd party payer system, more doctors in a give area can and does actually drive total costs higher with no improvement in quality of care or outcomes than in areas with fewer doctors per capata.
I know it is counter-intuitive, but the author gave an example that included the Dallas metro area.
Under the perverse incentives of the current system, more health care providers does equal more competition and lower costs. It actually results in higher total costs. The authors point is that we have removed traditional market mechanisms from the system which distorts everything.