Recap from previous post: Physicians want to make more money, not less. So if regulators and insurers shut off one stream of revenue, they’ll find another. Medicare and private insurers won’t pay for low-value procedure ‘X’’? No problem! We’ll just do more ‘Y’ procedures! It’s called gaming the system.
Net result: despite decades of cost-saving reforms, U.S. healthcare is still the most expensive in the world (per capita and GDP). Yet U.S. physicians keep making more money every year. And the entire healthcare system benefits financially from income generated by our doctors.
It’s no accident that U.S. physicians make more than their counterparts in other developed countries, (not counting Luxembourg). And I mean way more. Here’s one comparison from a few years ago:
How can we contain costs if we can’t constrain doctors? As it is, American physicians made good money, yet six in ten feel they deserve even more. If healthcare reform actually threatened to put in a serious dent in their income, physicians, hospitals, and the American Medical Association would push back hard.
What to do? Plenty of cost-saving reforms have been already tried in the U.S. or in other developed countries, including:
Many of these measures have or would cut costs in the U.S. - but not by much in the grand scheme of things, mostly due to compensatory counter-actions by physicians and hospitals.
I do have some other cost-saving ideas though. Next
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Sources:
Big Raises Become Less Commonplace: Medscape APRN Compensation Report 2025 Jon McKenna | November 14, 2025 https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2025-APRN-compensation-6018790#1
Comparing Your Pay Against Your Peers’: Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2025 Jon McKenna | July 8, 2025 https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2025-compensation-overview-6018103?icd=login_success_email_match_norm#20