Next, imagine artificial scarcity created by the College in order to raise incomes. Raising the incomes increases the value of the “meal ticket”, and entitles the College to raise training fees, erect higher barriers of entry, fund powerful lobby groups to entrench their position.

This, professor, is the state of the medical industry today.

You are quite right that there is no free markets, owing to layers and layers of government intervention.

However, most of these interventions are a result of asymmetry of information: i.e. patients may be able to judge whether a doctor is nice, but not whether a doctor is effective or safe. The cosmetics industry is an example of what a wild-west of medicine may have looked like.

We need to accept that medicine is one of the roles that government play in our daily lives, but also accept that when it fails to work, the rules of the game needs to be further adjusted to account for the effect of applying the rules in the first place. This has to be done iteratively. Over in Australia, where public health insurance operates, the government is now contemplating an increase in charges to account for budgetary blowouts. This is in itself not bad, because it has managed to hold medical cost (% GDP) at an internationally competitive level.