Re: Medical education. You run the problem of screwing over the people caught in the transition -- people like me who will hold around $200,000 in debt at graduation, then accruing interest for about four years only to finally get a license with reduced salary and no way to pay it back. Sure we can somehow take care of those people, you will say, but did that happen when the government decided to reduce interest rates only for undergrads while simultaneously eliminating the 20/220 rule for residents? Furthermore, you have almost 50,000 people/year trying to get in and only ~18,000 making it, all the while with high tuition increasing at 8%/year. There is no incentive to pay people in med school or (better) in residency because people already pay to do it. In fact, you could probably drop physician salaries right now until the supply and demand match. Why hasn't this already happened? I would imagine because people think physicians actually *should* be well-paid for what they do. Satisfaction in primary-care is already almost nil, so if you dropped the salary I suspect we will all be visiting nurse practitioners for anything but major disease.
