[huitzitziltzin]

>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.

[1] https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...

[travisp]

"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).