Ooooh...you've misunderstood me. I don't advocate forcing others to buy corporate health insurance.
Thank you for correcting me. In any case, I do think it's a mistake to hand us over to the insurance industry as so much livestock. The mandate is a blatant abuse of government power and another example of Democrat/Republican corporatism.
Demand for cheap healthcare. That interests me. That's going to be difficult as long as physicians have to pay huge portions of their salaries for malpractice insurance. And the WORK involved! JEEZ! One patient contact for me, at my level (if the patient is very sick, or injured) is AT LEAST and hour and a half of documentation. And this is to avoid lawsuits, and to prove your competency to the state in which one is licensed, and to your employer-where there are usually people hired to check documentation to make sure that providers aren't killing patients. (more $$$) We're not going to work for free.
And then there are hospitals who eat the cost of uncompensated care. My understanding is that these medical centers get private grants, and government grants....so we all pay for it.
But the demand for cheaper healthcare. How could we go about bringing that to fruition?
Well, I'll wager that most of your patients either have insurance, or can't afford to walk through the your door. If they have insurance, they don't care how much you're charging, and if they don't they simply avoid your services until they are desperate enough to qualify for aid or free ER treatment. The people left who can pay, and aren't covered with low deductible policies, do represent a genuine demand for low-cost care but there aren't enough of them to have an impact. We need more people paying for more of their care out of pocket and the frustrating irony of the mandate is that it pursues the exactly the opposite goal.
So that leaves us with the counter-intuitive solution of discouraging insurance coverage rather than mandating it. We need everyone who can pay for health care out-of-pocket doing so. Then we'll restore demand for better bargains on health care. It will also provide in incentive to re-examine regulations that (like those you mention above) add to the cost of doing business as a doctor.
I'm not necessarily saying we should go without insurance altogether, but we should pay for as little of it as we can possible manage, preferring cheaper catastrophic plans to expensive plans. The later aren't cost effective anyway and provide only the illusion of savings via low deductibles.