In today’s Acton Commentary I explore how our hyper-regulated and increasingly statist healthcare system is chasing off good physicians.

A recent article in Forbes by Bruce Japsen provides some additional support for that argument:

Doctor and nurse vacancies are approaching nearly 20 percent at hospitals as these facilities prepare to be inundated by millions of patients who have the ability to pay for medical care thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

A survey by health care provider staffing firm AMN Healthcare shows the vacancy rate for physicians at hospitals near 18 percent in 2013 while the nurse vacancy rate is 17 percent. That vacancy rate is more than three times what it was just four years ago when vacancies for nurses were just 5.5 percent in 2009 while vacancies for doctors were 10.7 percent.

It’s not all doom and gloom. In an earlier Forbes piece, Scott Gottlieb, an internist and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argues that technological and organizational innovation will allow quality health care to be delivered using fewer physicians.

If allowed to proceed, these innovations may actually increase market freedom in one area. Physician organizations and medical schools often have replicated a pernicious feature of the traditional guild, namely, finding ways to limit the number of new physicians not purely as a quality control measure but, beyond this, as a way to ensure that existing physicians are in high demand. One example: medical schools typically demand that their students not only master the relevant skills for serving as a physician but also make them work extraordinarily long shifts on top of their studies.

The problem isn’t the demand for hard work or long practice in a clinical setting. The problem is that medical schools have frequently gone beyond this to wring cheap labor out of med students and, in the process, have made outsized physical stamina an indispensable aptitude for ing a physician. That’s unfortunate because there are many physician jobs that do not require even average physical stamina to excel in. Thus, any reform that would create alternative avenues for talented people to train and eventually deliver high quality medical care is a good thing.

Three caveats to Gottlieb’s optimistic portrait of next-generation health care. First, as Gottlieb himself notes, while there may be enough physicians for the emerging healthcare delivery paradigm, ongoing changes pushing people into more HMO-like insurance arrangements may mean you won’t have as much flexibility about which physicians and which hospitals will accept your health insurance. As Gottlieb explains:

What Obamacare, in effect, tells Americans, is that the White House believes many people made the wrong choice when they rejected those HMOs in favor of PPO plans that offer broader access to providers (often in exchange for slimmed down benefits and, in many cases, higher deductibles).

Second, while there has been a protectionist aspect to medical schools, and while the healthcare system would surely benefit from reforms allowing non-physicians with relevant expertise (nurse practitioners, etc.) to deliver more of our basic health care, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that running off petent and highly trained physicians promise some people’s health care. Sometimes it takes someone with a breadth of medical training to determine with some confidence that a patient’s seemingly basic problem really is a basic problem and not something more serious. The implication: whether it’s a physicians’ guild or bad government policy, anything that constricts the development and deployment of skilled diagnostic resources (human or machine) promise healthcare to some degree.

Third, the positive innovations Gottlieb describes require public policy that encourages rather discourages those innovations. Gottlieb and Ezekiel Emanuel make the point late in a recent New York Times piece:

The opportunity exists to deliver more services and care with fewer physicians, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. Policy changes will be necessary to reach the full potential of team care.

That means expanding the scope of practice laws for nurse practitioners and pharmacists to allow them to prehensive primary care; changing laws inhibiting telemedicine across state lines; and reforming medical malpractice laws that force providers to stick with inefficient practices simply to reduce liability risk.

What is the take-home from all this? The key and too-little used ingredient for effective healthcare reform is freedom: greater freedom for panies pete for physicians and patients across state lines; greater freedom for hospitals, clinics and pharmacies to petent non-physician healthcare personnel to provide primary care where they deem it effective, with the customer free to direct her business to the healthcare provider offering her the bination of quality and value; the freedom to pursue a career as a physician without facing protectionist roadblocks irrelevant to the task of ing petent physician in one’s chosen specialization; freedom for physicians to practice medicine without facing the threat of frivolous and outlandishly expensive lawsuits when they fail to be an all-seeing and all-powerful god for an ailing patient, lawsuits that drive up overhead for doctors’ offices and all but force physicians to practice defensive medicine by over-prescribing expensive tests; and, most fundamentally, the freedom for physicians and other front-line healthcare workers to work with and for their patients instead of for a suffocating government bureaucracy.