Doctor pay
By 
Some stats:
The average U.S. physician earns $350,000 a year. Top doctors pull in 10 times that.
When those simple data points were first presented in 2020, a small subset of physicians came unglued on the microblogging site formerly known as Twitter, slinging personal insults and at least one deeply unflattering photo illustration of an economist.
We couldn’t understand why.
The figures are nigh-on unimpeachable. They come from a working paper, newly updated, that analyzes more than 10 million tax records from 965,000 physicians over 13 years. The talented economist-authors also went to extreme lengths to protect filers’ privacy, as is standard for this type of research.
By accounting for all streams of income, they revealed that doctors make more than anyone thought — and more than any other occupation we’ve measured. In the prime earning years of 40 to 55, the average physician made $405,000 in 2017 — almost all of it (94 percent) from wages. Doctors in the top 10 percent averaged $1.3 million. And those in the top 1 percent averaged an astounding $4 million, though most of that (85 percent) came from business income or capital gains.
In certain specialties, doctors see substantially more in their peak earning years: Neurosurgeons (about $920,000), orthopedic surgeons ($789,000) and radiation oncologists ($709,000) all did especially well for themselves. Specialty incomes cover 2005 to 2017 and are expressed in 2017 dollars.
Not all doctors breathe that rarefied air. Even in these peak years, family-practice physicians made around $230,000 a year. General practice ($225,000) and preventive-medicine ($224,000) doctors earned even less — though that’s still enough to put them at the top of the heap among all U.S. earners.
How do these numbers look from a comparative perspective?
“In general, U.S. physicians are making about 50 percent more than German physicians and about more than twice as much as U.K. physicians,” internal medicine physician Atul Grover told us. Grover leads the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Research and Action Institute, teaches medicine at George Washington University and speaks with the easy authority and charisma of someone who probably deserves to be earning several times what we do.
Grover said the widest gaps were “really driven by surgeons and a handful of procedural specialties,” doctors who perform procedures with clear outcomes, rather than preventing disease or treating chronic conditions. ”In the United States, we’re not about prevention, you know?” he said, noting that his own PhD is in public health. “It would be great if it was different, but it ain’t!”
In marked contrast to the legal profession, a big factor here is that for many decades now the relevant self-regulating bodies in the medical field have managed to keep the supply of licensed physicians in the US very low, relative to population growth.
I haven’t seen an analysis of how much the extraordinary economic inefficiency of the American medical system — which costs two to five times as much per capita as the comparable systems in the rest of the developed world, while generally producing below average outcomes relative to that baseline — is due to physician compensation levels. I assume a lot of work has been done in this area but I’m not familiar with it.