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Notes -
This isn't strictly an answer to your question, but it seems like health insurance (and its government regulators) has acquired at least a bit of a role of gatekeeping which procedures are actually worthwhile in terms of efficacy and reasonable expenditures. Honestly, I think there's probably a place for a more formal adversarial role in medicine asking whether any given intervention is the right choice, both for the patient and for the rest of us who bear the aggregate burden of paying for treatment (through taxes and insurance). But that would probably require a serious national discussion (we never really have those) about the massive cost and questionable benefit of a lot of primarily-end-of-life care -- "death panels." I think we already have a broad consensus that most elective cosmetic surgeries should be treated differently than reconstructive ones.
More practically, while I'm generally sympathetic to doctors and (adult) patients making their own decisions, there are examples where the government has seemingly-successfully cracked down on perceived excesses. The examples that come to mind are mostly Medicare/Medicaid fraud (see prescriptions for power wheelchairs about a decade ago) and the opioid crisis, where credentialed doctors have become much more reluctant to prescribe opioids, and have to jump through lots of hoops to track the prescriptions that are issued -- the last time I saw such a prescription issued, it involved time-sensitive two-factor authentication codes to write a electronic prescription for just a couple pills that ended up costing less than a dollar. Although I've heard anecdotes complaining that doctors are now too stingy with painkillers that I can't personally confirm. And that isn't even considering that "doctor shopping" in this context plausibly includes the "undocumented pharmacist" on the streetcorner depending on how you measure your outcomes.
I think the answer you're looking for is that if
taxpayersvoters have a sufficiently strong preference, the government can at least make it difficult for doctor shopping to be viable, although probably not impossible.More options
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