Maybe it's time to loosen up the laws on who can practice medicine. In my experience in emergency rooms, only a few of the people coming in have life-threatening situations. Most are people who are ill, have suffered some cut or other injury too serious for home treatment, or have some other problem that doesn't really warrant a hospital visit, but they have nowhere else to go.

What kind of training does it really take to stitch up a kid, check for signs of infection or other serious problems, and send him home? Do we need people trained to handle the vast majority of non-hospitalization problems?

This has been done on an ad-hoc basis, with "free clinics" and the like. Could it be more organized? Is this already going on in other places and I just don't know about it?

I don't know enough about medical training, education, licensing requirments, possible liability issues, or all the rest to know if this is plausible. There are a LOT of questions I can't answer. But if we want to focus on "prevention," I think another tier of medical care would be useful.

Think professional midwives for childbirth. They are the first stop for normal situations, but if something comes up, the hospital is still there. Such midwives are trained, but they are, for the most part, not MDs.

Deregulate, just a bit?