Sure, it would make it cheaper. Would that result in these companies employing more doctors to perform the same amount of care at higher quality, or would it result in them retaining the standard of care they're currently providing while taking home a larger profit margin?

▲

mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-]

There are a lot of hospitals where there is an endless supply people showing up to the ER with non-emergent stuff because it is the only place required to take them, and their number is only limited by wait time due to triage; they'll just leave if it takes too long as their life isn't threatened and they have something else to do.

You could hire a whole army of doctors and they'd still be there, word gets around. If the doctors are cheap enough to cover whatever you can get from debt collection agencies to sell off the debt they'll never pay, then you could hire a lot.

▲

rileymat2 2 days ago | parent [-]

If this is happening now, why would they cut the number of doctors?

▲

mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-]

They can't sell the debt for uninsured non-emergent case for enough money to cover the doctor.

Cutting doctors means only the most prioritized triage cases makes it to doctors, which skews towards people that are employed or on medicare and the money can be recouped, and thus improves profitability.

It's an end-run against the requirement they take in the hordes of people with no insurance who show up to the ER for low-income cases and no way to pay it.

If doctors were so cheap as to be covered by the sales to debt collectors, the whole thing gets flipped, as it would be profitable to just hire armies of them to cover the hordes who come in with non-emergent cases.

▲

rileymat2 2 days ago | parent [-]

Do we really think an increase in the supply of doctors will cause prices to collapse so hard that selling off unpaid medical debt will be profitable?

	▲	mothballed 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That depends, can we use IRS agents with guns to collect money to backstop unpaid medical debt?