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.
