Since the rapidly rising cost of health care services is basically the only thing that matters in the whole government budget discussion, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
One frequent assertion is that the limited supply of doctors (because of semi-monopolistic medical-school, licensing, and immigration policies) is a big contributing factor.
So when I came across the following data set, I decided to chart it:
It doesn’t seem to have any obvious correlation with health-care costs:
The low-doctors-per capita phenomenon actually seems to be more related to the anglo model (and Japan). Only Australia is an outlier.
I’m not saying the idea is wrong. More doctors sounds like a good idea to me. Just that this slice of data doesn’t say so.
(I threw in China just cause I was curious.)