Tigerle,
I grew up in a small town in the mid-west, which affords me the use of lots of colorful colloquialisms
Do you expect that if the doctor's have lower debt burdens that they will, out of the goodness of their hearts, take a salary cut? Some doctors choose their particular profession strictly because of the take home pay incentive. The current system allows some to inflate their take home pay by gaming the billing system, sending unnecessary charges to the insurance, who then pay the medical facility. All of this drives up out-of-pocket costs as well as insurance costs.
Now you are talking about individual doctors again.
It is all ab It how you incentivise a system, and which lobbies shape the incentives.
Clearly, a system in which office visits are artificially inflated benefits neither insurers nor patients, but doctors - as long as every single office visit is reimbursed on a scale that makes economic sens. The insurance simply won’t care, as long as they can shift the cost to the patients in the long run. So, inflating office visits must be a policy that has been lobbied for by doctors‘ professional associations, whose primary motivator is driving up income.
Can there be any other motivator, you ask? Sure, there professional ethics and pride, but those need room to work! If the system ie shaped diffentlym eg if insurance contributions are capped, or if a single payer acts to keep costs down, you can cap the revenue from office visits. Suddenly, patients who turn up are more work than they are worth. Overworked NHS GPs do not lobby for more office visits, even if they were to generate a somewhat higher income, because they do not have astronomical debts to service.
Hopefully, doctors then should have an incentive to lobby to be reimbursed for exactly the number of office visits from a patient they need in order to do their job, and do it well.
If you have a workforce made up of servants indentured to their student loan companies, the primary motivator must always be driving up income generating costs, It’s not about doctors being good or bad people, it’s about whether professional ethics endanger your preofessional and financial existence.
Edited to add that I do hope this situation works out with the least burden on you and our child!
