It obviously is. A federal government policy decision caps the number of doctors we have, and another federal government policy decision restricts a huge number of basic medical services to those doctors.

The AMA is creating the bottleneck, not the government directly.

When the government accepts AMA lobbying and sets a regulatory cap on the number of new residencies, it is regulating, and is fully culpable for doing so. Your logic basically defines the government away, treating it instead as the product of the influences acting on it.

> sets a regulatory cap on the number of new residencies

there is no regulatory cap on the number of new residencies

there is a cap on _federal funding_ for new residency slots; yes that impacts hospitals' willingness to add new positions, but it's _not_ the same as a regulatory cap

What kind of issue it is then ? If a regulation permits the doctors associations to set the allowed number of doctors residency, naively it is a regulatory issue.

It's a funding issue. There aren't enough residency slots available given the number of medical school grads. Residency is a requirement to get a medical license--which is issued by the states, not the federal gov. The reason there aren't enough residency slots is because they are heavily subsidized by the federal gov and they put a cap on the funding. No one else wants to foot the bill, so the slots remain limited, thus the licenses remains limited.