The focus on insurance is all wrong but not surprising. As long as the medical community (i.e. doctors) can tightly restrict the number of med school students and med schools for that matter we will continue to have a small body of overpaid doctors. The med schools intentionally stack the rosters with foreign students knowing that many will leave the US and not dilute the field.
Break that stranglehold and the free enterprise system will fix the crisis very quickly.
Wow. Second time this month I've seen this. The cabal of doctors restricting the numbers of new docs.
The numbers of new docs is restricted by the high cost of the infrastructure needed to educate them. Hillary managed to influence the closings of a few medical schools, over the screams of the academic docs.
The US does not educate foreign docs only to send them back overseas, because the docs here prefer to stay here. What the US (and the certification boards) DO is to certify a large number of foreign-educated physicians. Or haven't you noticed that in your local hospital. The US gets the benefit of other countries having to subsidise the high ed costs of med school...thanks to the willingness of medical cert boards. There is no conspiracy here.
Educating a doctor is much more costly than educating a lawyer. For a law school, all you need are classrooms, a library, and a few brokendown rainmakers. That's why we have such a delightful wealth of lawyers. For a med school, you have to have labs, libraries, highly compensated doc teachers, expensive cadavers for Gross Anatomy (morticians and pathologists maintain them)...this is why there are not enough docs. Plus, now that half of the med school students are women, you can count on some of them marrying their fellow doctors and never practicing medicine at all, or taking on less demanding practices.