The inspiration for this Post was reading this:
A common complaint in the American healthcare debate is that physicians make too much money, and that their pay is a major reason healthcare is so expensive. But a U.S. surgeon recently spent an administrative day crunching the numbers, and he argues the reality doesn't match the outrage.
“Physician salaries account for roughly 8.6% of total healthcare costs [in the U.S.],” the surgeon wrote in a Reddit post on r/Salary. “It's around 10% in Canada, 15% in Germany, 11% in France, 11.6% in Australia, and 9.7% in the UK.”
Critics often argue that U.S. physicians earn much more than their international peers. But when the Reddit poster compared salaries of engineers, teachers, lawyers and plumbers in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and France, he found similar ratios to physician salaries across all professions.
— Adrian Volenik/Yahoo Finance Many Think Doctors Are Overpaid And That's Why Healthcare Is So Pricey, But One U.S. Surgeon Actually Ran The Numbers Against Global Peers. July 23, 2025
To which I say: why would percent of total healthcare spending be a relevant statistic in determining whether US physicians get paid too much compared to countries with much lower healthcare spending overall? Per the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, the US spent $13,432 on healthcare per capita in 2023, a whole lot more than Germany ($8,441) and almost twice as much as Canada ($7,013) and France ($7,136). Lower spending overall translates to lower physician salaries in Germany, Canada and France, especially when you factor in that these countries have more doctors per capita than the US: 4.4 doctors per 1,000 population in Germany, 3.7 in France, 2.7 in Canada, and 2.6 in the US (OECD). Here are the average physician salaries in each country:
Also, it’s simply false that the ratio of physician salaries to the those of engineers, teachers, lawyers, and plumbers are similar across these countries. The salary gap between physicians and the other occupations is much higher in the US than in the other countries:
I’m more interested in the salary gap between physicians and the average worker. As it turns out, that gap is also bigger in the US than in Canada, France and Germany. And yet Americans see their doctors less often than the Canadians, French and Germans. In fact, the bigger the salary gap, the fewer doctor visits per capita:
So, yes, American physicians do get paid too much compared to other developed countries. And their excess pay is a non-negligible factor in our sky-high healthcare spending - per the Commonwealth Fund, accounting for about 10% of the difference in spending between the US and comparable countries. But an even bigger factor than what US doctors earn is how they manage to earn so much. (To be addressed soon).
Links:
Commonwealth Fund_Where US Healthcare Spending Goes
OECD_Average Annual Wages 2023
Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker
Statista_Annual Doctor Consultations by Country_2022
Yahoo Finance: Highest Paying Countries for Physician Salaries