Research shows that nurses have outcomes comparable to do those of doctors. It's not 10x as hard as SWE, don't buy into that. Plus, thats irrelevant, doctors supply is limited artificially and for no good reasons. The main culprit of high costs are is the insurance companies greed, but doctors are far from being blameless.
Are salaries the only source of income that they derive from the medical industry? My doctor is a part owner of his provider network which also is the insurer.
The big DI manufacturers have consulting arms that will help physicians with financing to buy CTs, MRI, PET, that will help them obtain Certificates of Need.
And having a hard time finding it now, but physicians who own a share in a DI lab tend to refer their patients for imaging far more generously than those who don't...
In the UK the government both limits the supply of doctors and manages a fairly cheap National Health Service. How? It is rationed by queuing and achieves poor medical outcomes.
I don't think any country has a healthcare system privatized to a higher degree than Switzerland? Yet they still manage to spend quite a bit less per capita than the US.