Prices fall when demand falls, when supply expands, or when market power weakens. That’s it. No amount of rhetoric changes those fundamentals. So it’s worth asking which of these levers our leaders are actually talking about pulling.

With housing, many proposals center on rent control. In markets where landlords have pricing power, rent caps can provide relief. But when rent control limits prices without adding new housing, it suppresses investment. The recent experience of Minnesota’s Twin Cities illustrates this clearly. After St. Paul enacted one of the strictest rent-control ordinances in the country in 2022, apartment construction collapsed. Minneapolis avoided rent control and instead loosened zoning rules. Construction surged, and rents there grew more slowly.

In health care, the rhetoric is even more narrowly focused. Nearly all attention falls on insurance premiums, not on the clinics and hospital systems that actually deliver care. When people say they fear “losing health care,” they almost always mean losing health insurance. But insurance is not health care. Health care is produced by physicians, nurses, clinics and hospitals, and the supply of those inputs has been unusually tight for generations.

The American Medical Association regularly warns of a looming physician shortage. What those warnings rarely acknowledge is organized medicine’s long role in creating that shortage. From the closure of medical schools, to strict limits on residency slots, to persistent opposition to competition from other sources of care, the supply of clinicians has been deliberately constrained.

The consequences are visible everywhere. Physicians work longer hours than the average worker. Hospitals operate near capacity even in normal years. During COVID, many regions experienced hospital bed shortages not simply because of a virus, but because the system had very little slack to begin with. These are classic signs of restricted supply originating from the market power of health care incumbents.

This is why subsidy-based solutions deserve skepticism. Subsidies can be useful in the short run. They dull pain, much like morphine. But they do not heal the wound. Subsidies raise demand, not supply. When more people can pay for care but the system cannot produce more clinicians, beds or appointments, much of the extra spending shows up as higher provider income rather than lower prices.

To his credit, Utah Congressman Blake Moore has noted this dynamic, warning that expanding subsidies without addressing supply risks pushing more money into the system without fixing the underlying problem. Recent findings from the Government Accountability Office reinforce the concern. In undercover testing, the federal Marketplace approved subsidized coverage for nearly all fictitious applicants in 2024 and 2025, even when documentation was missing. In a single year, more than $21 billion in premium tax credits could not be reconciled with tax filings. Even if every dollar were perfectly targeted, none of this would create more health care. It creates demand on paper, not supply in reality.

Defenders of the current system often argue that tight supply protects quality. But the line between quality and protectionism is not always clear. Many routine procedures — suturing small wounds, removing benign skin lesions, irrigating ears, managing straightforward infections — could be safely handled by nurses or clinicians trained in short, focused programs. Dermatologists routinely remove moles with a razor blade; the bottleneck exists not because the work is impossibly complex, but because entry is tightly controlled.

The contrast with veterinarians makes the point stark. Veterinarians complete nearly as many years of schooling as physicians, perform a wide range of procedures across species, and work in markets with far fewer entry restrictions. Their median income is around $120,000. Physicians average $300,000 to $400,000 or more. The difference is not talent or effort. It is market structure.

If we are serious about affordability, we have to be serious about economics. Prices fall only when supply expands or market power weakens. Because no one wants falling demand and slogans do not expand supply, the path forward is clear.

Subsidies may dull the pain. They may buy time. But until we expand supply and confront provider market power, affordability will remain a promise rather than an outcome.

Gavin Roberts is an associate professor of economics and chair of the economics department at Weber State University. He is a recipient of the Gordon Tullock Prize from the Public Choice Society and regularly shares his research locally, nationally and internationally. This commentary is provided through a partnership with Weber State. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent the institutional values or positions of the university.