Surprise hospital billing and healthcare in America.......We got (staffing) problems

 In 2006 I was driving a Dodge Sprinter delivering Oxygen and Hospital beds, walkers and 3-in-1 commodes.  I noticed all the fancy cars and insane new housing starts. Certain people who should be pinching pennies were spending extravagantly. The world and neighborhoods I drove through seemed so out of whack. Turns out they were. The 2008 crisis was only surprising in it's scale and exact location.  We were warned.  As I drove that truck around the greater Phoenix area I heard warnings the year before. NPR interviewed a woman who bought a house on the outskirts of St. Paul Minnesota. She was just experiencing the reset of the rate and the first wave of what would be known as the subprime mortgage crisis. Unscrupulous allocators of capital who are supposed job creators and are universally lauded were preying on people every day who were trying to buy a home they couldn't afford. 
     It doesn't have to be like this. There are always people who will instinctively know that some deals and schemes are all wrong for the customer. The incentives to look the other way are often enough greater than one's ability to separate out their own interests. We need to systematize the moral audit of pretty much every business interaction. It just happens with such frequency.  We have to start looking out for the individual citizen in this country and not just allow corporations to game every system.
    This year's unethical yet systemic hit is "surprise medical billing". This term is waaaay too vague to be of any use.  Fifty percent of healthcare is a surprise.  It's not a surprise to those designing the bills. Over the weekend I learned that what has happened is that Wall Street has bought itself a  very large Health Insurance Company.  United Health Care but I imagine that this is more systemic as is the use of this billing tactic. As far as I understand it works like this the numbers people look for ways for the insurance company to dodge paying for something and what they've found is out of network physicians that you may be seen by as part of your trip to the Emergency room.  You could be at an in network hospital and it won't matter. Staffing a hospital emergency room is probably no picnic.  By that I mean some days it feels damn near impossible to find the required number and type of physicians needed to be up to code. You as a hospital emergency room staffer are incentivised to staff those doctors you have access to. So an out of network doctor is no big deal in the larger context of finding any doctor.
     We have a human capital shortage in healthcare.  It's worse than widely discussed partly because every type of healthcare professional that we need more of is more valuable based on that shortage.  The AMA keeps the number of doctors in medical school artificially low so that doctors are more able to make money.
    It's not just doctors. We need nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and nurse practitioners. How can we accomplish this
 #1   America needs to start thinking of our healthcare infrastructure and human capital the way we think about the Marine Corps or National Security. We need to internalize that the health of every American effects the health of other Americans and thus it is good and right that we provide for a healthy population. And we need to also understand that if there were every and pandemic, biological attack, or other disaster a robust healthcare sector would be our only defense after the fact. Think of it like a patriot missile for a bio-attack. Until the moment you actually need it you may scoff at the expense and space it takes up but in the midst of an attack you'd be praying thanks on your knees in your worst moment of fear.
#2.   We need to double the number of doctors we are graduating.  I don't have a problem with this because the doctors we have are only ok and what we really need is more so that our wait times are reduced.
#3   Immigration reform that incentivises doctors to stay here longer once they've completed their training.
I hope there are solutions that are heading in this direction.  There are lots of smart and good people in the world but none of them seem to ever be in the room when Wall Street or Big Pharma or the Telecoms are writing the legislation that actually gets passed in this country. Time to clean the place out.  Drain the swamp if you will.