Please think this through.

I have already said the variables, or points of influence, are significantly greater and deeper than just one item.

Government has its paws in dentistry and eye care just as much as it does everywhere else in the medical field. Let's take three of those layers.

First: By guaranteeing exorbitant student loans it causes people to graduate with $300K+ in hard costs for their degrees. Medical education is not a free market in that sense. Universities can charge whatever they want because they have guarantees from the federal government. It's easy for an 18 year old to enter into a $300K+ commitment without having a clue what that means in the long term.

Second: Government has known that our tort laws are in real need of modification. The cost of malpractice insurance varies from specialty to specialty, yet it can be in the tens of thousands of dollars per year. It is important to note that, when you walk into a hospital, the entire medical staff has to be on malpractice insurance and the hospital itself has a set of umbrella policies.

Third: If you are going to face attorneys, you need attorneys of your own. Hospitals have expensive law firms, attorneys on staff or more.

Fourth. Medical device and drug regulatory costs are insane. I tried to develop a simple hearing assist device years ago. The FDA costs to get this super-simple device (that would have potentially helped tons of people) was easily in the tens of millions of dollars. Massive. It also required years of pounding your head into the FDA wall to push it through. This is one of the reasons for which we have lots of bright engineers working on how to get people to click on ads rather than on developing medical solutions.

Fifth: The tort reform issue extends into the medical device and pharmaceutical industries. Let's say I did make that simple hearing assist device. Well, I would have had to have a sizable amount of cash devoted to both liability insurance and simply paying attorneys a ton of cash to defend from lawsuits. This is a sad reality of any industry in the US and it is particularly worse in the medical domain. Our companies get sued all the time, and it cost a ton of money to defend yourself and your company. This is why most of them try to settle and avoid courts. It's expensive, yet cheaper. In fact, this could be a sixth point, how the government has fucked-up courts, but I'll leave that one out.

There's more, a lot more. I haven't just had a casual look at this. I've been running businesses my entire life. I am very much used to deep analysis of the cost structure of things before reaching conclusions. Most people don't do this. They look at something like "raise minimum wage" and think of it as a single variable problem rather than the complex multivariate system of equations it represents.

The medical industry is governed by financial equations as well. And just like in any other industry, the cost of goods sold (COGS) drives the cost of products and services end-users pay. Just like nobody is going to sell you a laptop or an iPhone at a loss, nobody is going to perform surgery or see a patient at a loss. Each layer in the chain has costs, families, loans, responsibilities to look after.

At the most basic level the problem is simple: If you increase COGS, prices go up.

And then there's the need for profit. Yes, I did say "need". I know some think profit is evil. Well, get over it. It is a necessity.

Have you ever had to keep people employed, leases and rents paid, mortgages paid, student loans paid, for, say, six months or a year because of some event that led to an economic downturn?

Most people only think of this pandemic as such an event. Not so. This kind of thing happens every so often in business due to a range of reasons. I had to take a second mortgage on my home and fill-up a bunch of credit cards to keep people at my company employed back in 2008~2010. We had a bunch of money (from profits) saved-up, yes. It wasn't enough. We were coming out of a couple of years of capital intensive R&D and were not ready for what happened with the economy. Profit --business and personal-- leads to savings which leads to stability.

In a nutshell, a person graduating with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans, needing tens of thousands of dollars per year in malpractice insurance, with hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) in additional debt (home, cars), etc., will demand a high salary. Not because they are greedy, because they could not live without it. When your base burn is $15K to $20K per month, you can't work for minimum wage.

This leads to healthcare costs being high. You have millions of medical professionals and millions of medical clinics of all kinds who's financial equations are driven by exorbitant costs that are a direct result of government action or inaction for decades.

These are not new problems. They've been talking about them every election for as long as I can remember. It's just talk. Nobody does a thing about it. Just like gun control. Talk, talk, talk. People vote for you and then you do nothing about it. I don't understand why millions of people don't rise up and protest the abject incompetence and dishonesty of our elected officials. They have been talking about fixing this and fixing that for over fifty years and do nothing. Our political system is badly broken. And we pay for it in more ways than one.

You might disagree with me because, perhaps, you like government to run everything. Yes, government is necessary, and yet it has to be controlled and in moderation. Reality doesn't change because you don't like what you just read. And our reality is that our healthcare system has the government's fingerprint all the way to the starting point, when a well-intentioned 18 year old decides they want to become a medical professional. We have friends who have literally sent their children to other countries to study medicine (they can because they have dual citizenship) because they can graduate with a good medical degree at a small fraction of the cost of what the equivalent education would be here in the US. That, to me, says it all.