[impossiblefork]

I don't think there's necessarily much not understood.

Here in Sweden have almost 2x as many physicians you do, and we pay them about half of what you do, so we end up paying approximately the same in salaries (the average Swedish physician is paid 131k) and I think it works out completely.

We start our training of physicians right after high school, so we push them to get an MSc in Medicine, rather than treating physicians as some kind of pseudo-PhDs, with however requiring head physicians to have an actual PhD; and this system is fine. I think it's the same way in Denmark, and given the stuff they've come up with I imagine one can't complain much about their system.

[a_vanderbilt]

A big driver for the high salaries of medical doctors in the U.S. is the staggering educational debt their degrees leave them with. Is it the same in Sweden? Some degree of wage depression is practically inevitable if we had more doctors, but I wonder how much that could be offset with affordable education?

[atombender]

No. Universities in Sweden are free to citizens (including EU/EEA citizens). That includes highly regarded universities such as Karolinska Institute (considered one of the top medical schools in Europe), Lund University, the University of Gothenburg, and so on.

In Scandinavia, student loans are taken to cover living expenses, not the cost of tuition. Private schools exist, but are not nearly as common as in the U.S.