Sure it could. Physician compensation, RVU billing, upcoding, and overdelivery aren't facts of nature. In fact, a lot of these problems are caused by Medicare regulation; we deliberately restrict the supply of physicians by underfunding residency slots, which is something the AMA lobbied to do.
But when institutions try to take these problems on, like when Blue Cross (IIRC) went after anaesthesiology upcoding abuses, industry lobbyists spin people up to think that insurers are demanding surgeons wake people up in the middle of operations. It's a real problem. People understand so little about how our system works that they will vociferously take the side of practitioners who are screwing them over.
(Everybody is screwing everybody over; I'm not taking a side, except to point out that Table 19 of the NHE makes a pretty stark statement about where the money is going.)
But when institutions try to take these problems on, like when Blue Cross (IIRC) went after anaesthesiology upcoding abuses, industry lobbyists spin people up to think that insurers are demanding surgeons wake people up in the middle of operations. It's a real problem. People understand so little about how our system works that they will vociferously take the side of practitioners who are screwing them over.
(Everybody is screwing everybody over; I'm not taking a side, except to point out that Table 19 of the NHE makes a pretty stark statement about where the money is going.)