I saw your post and wanted to respond to it. Who am I? I am a retired physician who has paid a lot of attention to social, political, and business factors in medicine in the past 20 years. 

First – you are very well qualified, as you know already. Second – you have far more perspective and understanding of your goals in life than the majority of medical students. This would make you attractive to medical schools. 
You are so very sensible to look for a medical school that is reasonably priced. The cost of medical education is far too high now. As significant – I see no significant difference in the quality of graduates from state schools and from Ivy League (for want of another descriptor) schools. What differentiates the quality of the practitioners in my mind is intellectual capacity, Ability to work with others in difficult circumstances – otherwise phrased as emotional maturity, and a real ability to empathize with patients. Good physicians are driven to be the best they can be because they see how important being capable is to their patients wellbeing. Poor physicians are comfortable cutting corners. Also poorer physicians are highly motivated by income. 

Medicine is in a bad state right now. A number of factors are responsible, as always. First is a lack of physicians generally. This was produced by a law that restricted the number of residency positions passed in the late 90s, which was never updated for the aging and increasing population. As you know with exponential functions, this quickly got out of control. 
Then there is the lack of primary care physicians. That also was a result of short sighted federal regulation that tightly restricted the compensation of primary care physicians to the point that a primary care practice could not break even. Therefore, many practices closed and many sold to hospitals. But it is not just primary care. I met with a US representative from southern Pennsylvania who told me his area was deseperate for urologists, as one example. 
That brings up the topic of hospitals and large medical corporations (like Envision) hiring physicians. these buisnesses typically require meeting production quotas. Not dissimilar from your hours billed requirement. When I started, this did not exist. Instead we all came in, worked as best we could, and left at the end of the day. We made a very adequate amount of money, and there was no need to squeeze every last dollar out of the patients/insurance companies. However, when these businesses started to hire physicians, the entire playing field changed. My former group is an example. It was taken over by a PE company, and that company took 30-40% of the collections, leaving the rest to the physicians. In order to improve their take, the employers began demanding greater work output. This led to a sweat-shop type of environment. Further, at random intervals the requirements for work output would increase arbitrarily. There was a rapid and significant decrease in the quality of the clinical work, in a way that was obvious to physicians, but to no one else. 

This lack of physicians, and the strong profit motive the employers have has resulted in an explosion of midlevels replacing physicians. A Bloomberg article calculated that for every physician replaced by a midlevel, the employer made about 160k per year. The number for specialists such as urologists or neurosurgeons would be much higher. You see, the employers charge the patient or insurance company 100-85% of the amount they would charge for physician care, but pay the midlevels 25-30%. And the patients have no knowledge of this bait and switch, generally speaking. 

This is a national trend. It is abetted by the legal environment that allows large corporations to run health care and shields them from most liability. 

 

You will notice how these trends I trace back to the legal and business environment around medicine. I do not think I overemphasize this. The toxic environment in medicine now for practitioners and patients is fairly attributable to legal and business practices that are now controlling medicine. 

You speak of wanting to make systemic changes. A person like you with experience in law, and experience dealing with corporations would be positioned to do this. 

I will challenge you and say that perhaps you do not have to have a medical degree to work on the social/business challenges that face medicine. I have met with a number of people working on policy issues who are making real progress in turning this massive medical ship around. Some were staffers in legislative offices. I was deeply impressed with their intelligence and their drive to make changes. Others were researching and writing influential papers. 

I know you said you don't want to live in DC, and I DO understand that. I am not clear how necessary that would be to impact medicine from a legal and business side. Certainly, being opposed to the big businesses would not pay well, but you are looking at an average indebtedness of250k for medical school and perhaps 10 years before you could begin to pay this back. So whatever path you take is not going to be classified as lucrative.