The accusation someone made that you were a crazy neoliberal was because when you said:

The formal definition of shortage is: A situation where an external mechanism, such as government intervention, prevents price from rising.

You were saying that price caps ARE shortages. Which is ridiculous and untrue. It seemed you were saying that there wouldn’t be shortages if there were no regulations. Which is ridiculous and untrue. You probably should have decried the injustice of our food distribution system before saying there isn’t a food shortage. Like when Haitians were eating mud so they wouldn’t feel hungry while starving to death, you should acknowledge the injustice and dysfunction of the market, and propose better terminology.

If you had said where you were getting your definition from I could have understood why you were insisting your definition is correct while failing to capture some pretty obvious failures of the market.

I think you believe you’re using the definition as it’s given in Wikipedia for example. But read what it says carefully:

In economic terminology, a shortage occurs when for some reason (such as government intervention, or decisions by sellers not to raise prices) the price does not rise to reach equilibrium. In this circumstance, buyers want to purchase more at the market price than the quantity of the good or service that is available, and some non-price mechanism (such as “first come, first served” or a lottery) determines which buyers are served.

It’s the second sentence that’s the definition of a shortage. The first sentence is a cause of shortages, but the shortage is inadequacy of supply described in the second sentence.

I was lazy with terminology re doctor salaries I understand the distinction but didn’t think it was important. I thought you were saying that if doctors could be paid more there would be more doctors this alleviating the shortage. You were actually saying that if people had to pay incrementally for medical care, there wouldn’t be a shortage because people would decide they didn’t want it.

It wasn’t clear because you didn’t specify price cap. Medical service doesn’t really occur in classical market at all. There is a price but it’s paid through insurance contributions implemented through the tax system. Medical service is also a terrible example of basic market principals because medical service isn’t a commodity. The value of critical life saving treatment is all the money the buyer has.