American doctors aren't overpaid relative to our economy; they're just part of a country where everyone at the top makes a lot more.
SSRN · March 18, 2026 · 6425008
The Takeaway
We often blame high healthcare costs on high doctor salaries. This comparison across four countries shows that if you adjusted US doctor pay to match international levels of 'prestige,' it would barely lower total healthcare spending because the entire US labor market is just shifted higher.
From the abstract
We compare physician incomes using tax data from the United States, Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Physicians are concentrated in the top percentiles of the income distribution in all four countries, especially in the United States and certain specialties. Physician incomes are highest in the United States, and a decomposition shows that this mainly reflects differences in overall income distributions, rather than physicians’ locations in those distributions. This suggests that broader lab