Solutions and Politics

Many of the most pressing problems have obvious solutions, but they'll lack political feasibility. For instance, in the United States, sixty percent of all personal bankruptcies are caused because patients are unable to pay for medical services contracted for, even though they have insurance. The reason for medical services' high costs is restricted supply of physicians to provide services. The smaller the number of physicians and other such medical specialists, the more limited those numbers are, the higher are charges for their services. If the charges exceed deductibles on the insurance policies of patients, those charges cause some patients to seek bankruptcy protection. The obvious solution would be simply to increase the number of physicians available to provide services so that the increased competition for patients would decrease amounts charged for the medical services rendered. But that would require government to found and to certify federal medical schools, in which the students paid no tuition; whose graduates (similar to graduates of federal military academies) would be mandated to provide services to the public at little cost, in public clinics, for a specific period of time, upon receipt of their federal medical degree licenses. But politics prevents such implementation. It would disturb the existing oligopoly in medicine.