One of my co-fellows was an IV league valedictorian and national level athlete. I'm pleased and grateful someone that talented, dedicated and driven to the point of obsession is diagnosing and treating neurological disease (and not, say, improving advertising algorithms for amazon or google).
That limit exists. It is called supply and demand. There is no need to artificially limit this, if other people want to enter the market.
However I don't think we should limit the number of anything, if are qualified and knowledgeable enough to do brain surgery, you should be allowed to. Not just because your family was rich enough to fund education or you were willing to foot the debt. Taking less profit out of education might help fix the doctor shortage.
Unfortunately that's just not how it works. I want the best people to do brain surgery(not everyone who can), just like if I'm running a formula one racing team, I really don't want every idiot who can barely drive a car cluttering the track.
1) That point is written very clearly just below the graph by the author.
2) It doesn't fundamentally change the argument. The rate of increase in the number of administrators has significantly outpaced the increase in physician numbers as costs have increased.
The problem with this line of thought is sometimes patients arrive that look like they have routine conditions (ear infection) which turn out to be not so routine (otitis media with encephalitis or a nasopharyngeal carcinoma). Or do you think NPs know a lot about sub-speciality presentations based on their two years of training?
People forget that physicians are the actual expertise in the hospital (there's a reason its 4 years med school plus a residency plus fellowships).
I think treating mid-level providers as corporate BS is very reductive and both underestimates these healthcare workers and overestimates physicians.
Again, a more granular analysis will point you in the direction of the layers and layers of administration and profiteering in the hospital rank and file.
Have you seen this graph?: https://investingdoc.com/the-growth-of-administrators-in-hea...
And again, very effective universal healthcare systems exist which remunerate physicians at the top end of the labour payment scale (and for good reason).
Now with nurse practitioners and other 'mid-level providers' creeping into all areas of clinical medicine, Americans are unfortunately likely to find out the hard way why appropriately remunerating people who operate on those nearest and dearest to you at their most critical times, is a good idea.