Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doctor's pay is not the driving factor behind increasing medical bills... administrative expenses at providers in insurance, opaque and arcane cost structures negotiated as deals between providers and insurance companies, and record profits at both insurance companies and providers point to a system that's cannibalizing itself. This will do nothing to costs even if implemented universally as it does nothing to addres…
I'm convinced that it's the cost structure, implemented by many-to-many negotiation between providers and insurers, that drives the uniquely high cost of the US health care system. (Unique as in twice as much per capita as the rest of the industrialized world.) Japan's system is structurally very similar to ours - employer-provided private insurance - with one key difference. In Japan, pricing for all medical goods/s…
In the US, Medicare pays for 40% of the market, and they set prices unilaterally. In addition to providers are legally required to charge private insurers more, Medicare has no mandate to keep the industry profitable, and in fact their reimbursement rates are about 7% lower than COGS. In other words, providers are (in the aggregate) losing money on Medicare patients on a per-patient basis, even before they account for overhead (building maintenance, staff wages, etc.).
Medicare knows this and admits as much - not just in their annual reports, but because they actually have a number of different stipend programs that provide extra money to providers who see a lot of Medicare patients, because otherwise they would literally go bankrupt and close their practices (ie, if they don't see enough privately-insured patients to be able to make up the gap, they will go out of business).
Medicare is, actually, the biggest beneficiary of price opacity in the American healthcare system today, but that opacity is not going anywhere.