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Doctors have to be paid a shitload in the US because they come out of college with an average of $250k in student loan debt (for GPs, specialists are higher). Those other countries that pay doctors a half or a quarter of US salaries will generally be somewhere between "very small costs", "no costs", or "actually paying students to attend", leaning towards the latter two, so doctors don't graduate with a home-mortgage worth of debt. However, a lot of people in the US are morally opposed to "giving someone else a free ride", you can see the current hubbub around student debt cancellation. And doctors heavily fall towards the higher-income side of the scale, so they are precisely the kinds of people that everyone points to as being undeserving of student debt relief. It is what it is, Americans are a selfish (ahem, libertarians would say self-interested) people, but you can't make this cost go away. People may not explicitly state it, but their preferences are obvious, they would rather pay 4x the amount to a private actor than have 1x the cost in taxes, same as the rest of the problems with our health care system. People are more worried about micromanaging what everyone "deserves" than overall cost efficiency, and they vote accordingly. It's rather sad, in a way, that Americans can't grasp that having a more highly educated, more skilled society benefits everyone in the long run. Those people go on to pay taxes, and educated people will contribute a lot more in taxes over their lifespan than they cost in education, it's a long term financial benefit, but people abhor the idea of someone getting "a free ride", despite it being the most financially vulnerable and unstable portion of people's adult lives. It's just straight-up "I chose to be a plumber, why should I have to pay for some fancy doctor's education!?". |