And I don’t believe that money is the sole issue.

Oh, but it is. 'Provider' is but one layer needing more and more money to compensate for effort and risk.

Money is the grease driving all layers of this direct-pay-for-care model; including the incentives driving each round of executive cost-shaving, because that's how management earns incentives. And while the output is executive bonuses, the input - what this feeds on - is people and their money and their coping and happiness. More and more. Custom-uh, patients pay more, care-givers work more, actual care is reduced, managers deal with more turnover, and execs buy lambos.

If you want to see a care system that is at risk but usable, look at the happiest countries. And then understand why that's at risk and decide whether we want to preserve it. Unfortunately, care-givers and other layers of the machine who no longer have to lay out hard cash for every effort and action will see their paycheques drop with those costs, and that'll make them sad if that's how they derive validation.

And while I'm talking about human acute care, mostly, the same goes for long-term care, veterinarian, and even ancillary-to-care sectors like transit. Greed at all levels in a zero-sum model makes victims of the people it's supposed to care for.