I don't believe any medical professional in Germany has wage exceeding 150k EUR yearly after taxes - doctors in the US sometimes have multiples of that, coincidentally 5x to 10x more is not unusual.
I believe that doctors in the US get paid more than in germany, but 60k seems very very low. Teachers have an income in that range....
Edit: Looking at some german articles, maybe they did not convert from eur to usd, ~80,000-100,000$ (depending on expertise etc) seems more likely for a dr working at a hospital (which is still low imho compared to US salaries...).
You have to keep in mind that med school and the equivalent of premed in germany is completely free. Of course that does not make up for the pay difference completely but it changes the perspective quite a bit imo, since med school in the US is extremely expensive.
Additionally I could totally see doctors being ok with less pay for the trade off of living in a more fair system.
Coincidentally I know one expat here that specifically does not want to return to the US to become a doctor there for that very reason. She specifically does not want to move back because she feels the healthcare system in the US is unfair and she would be profiting off of that system.
And furthermore you have to differentiate between "assistance" doctors (~82k $) and "chef" doctors (~336k $).
(I don't know the comparable titles in the US system)
Both values are taken from the parent's article and converted using Google.
Of course, mostly without serious student debt
I think the difference in wages narrows down with specializations. I linked just the "general practitioner" because I couldn't find an average including all the specializations.
I don't believe that salary income is the complete picture for physicians in the US. There are still a lot of doctors who are also "insider investors" in clinics, diagnostic equipment, and other medical businesses.
It's true that US doctors are paid more (although the gap isn't as big as it used to be). However, pay for US doctors makes up a fairly small portion of overall US medical expenditures (less than 10%). So, you could ask every doctor to work for free and not significantly change costs.
>pay for US doctors makes up a fairly small portion of overall US medical expenditures (less than 10%)
That is likely too low.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services provides a National Health Expenditure estimate annually. [1]
Physician and clinical services represented $772 billion out of about $3.8 trillion, so more like 20%.
Hospital services are the other big one: about $1.2 trillion.
US physicians are paid terrifically relative to their counterparts almost anywhere else, this is especially true for specialists.
In fact, physicians represent about 15% - 16% of the top 1% of income earners in the US. See table 2 from this paper: https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/BakijaColeHeimJobsInco...
which was written using tax return data, not, e.g., self-reported income data.
"Physician and clinical services" includes far more than pay for US doctors -- it's the entire costs for "services provided in establishments operated by Doctors of Medicine (M.D.) and Doctors of Osteopathy (D.O.), outpatient care centers, plus the portion of medical laboratories services that are billed independently by the laboratories". Doctors do not get even close to all of that money paid to them.
> In fact, physicians represent about 15% - 16% of the top 1% of income earners in the US.
This may be accurate, I'm unsure, but it wouldn't change that if US doctors were paid the same as their European counterparts, it would not make a truly significant change in overall US medical spending (this would even be true if doctors did actually make up 20% of medical expenditures, like you assert earlier).
There’s a similar (but smaller) differential for other medical professionals too. But more generally, when I’ve done high-level comparisons of medical spending between the US and Western European countries, it seems like every single cost element is more or less proportionately higher in the US. It seems like basically everyone is spending money in roughly the same proportions, including on things like doctors’ salaries - everything is just scaled up by ~40% to ~100% in the US, depending on which country you compare it to.
And doing so more frequently in the US, so cost is higher but so is rate of consumption, particularly of services and products that make us feel like we have more mastery over outcomes but in fact do not result in better outcomes on the whole.
