Absolutely, yes. Which is why people like me do research into ways of persuading doctors and other providers to prescribe antibiotics more judiciously. Unfortunately, there are a lot of barriers to overcome.
It's easy to rag on doctors for over-prescribing antibiotics, and I do it all the time, but you have to keep in mind that the vast majority of the time there is no way to know if a particular illness is viral or bacterial. Most upper respiratory infections are viral and don't need antibiotics, but still in most cases there isn't a simple test to tell you if it's bacterial. And you can't tell just by signs and symptoms, even though a lot of docs (and patients) may try to convince you otherwise ("green snot" does not equal bacterial infection, for example).
So often we try to convince docs that they don't need to prescribe an antibiotic, but what if that patient turns out to actually have a bacterial infection? Again, in most cases, it won't matter -- a lot of them will resolve even without antibiotics (otitis media being a good example). But a small minority of cases will not get better, and may get a lot worse.
Would you want to be the doctor that didn't prescribe antibiotics for that sore throat that ended up developing into a potentially life-threatening retropharyngeal abscess?
Psychologically, it would be very hard. Economically, it could be devastating. It's why we now have "defensive medicine", and we know who to thank for that.