Entry to medical school is also extremely competitive in Western Europe and there are also limits on number of places in some countries. And there are shortages of doctors as well.
I don't think that's key.
In Europe healthcare tends to be socialised and heavily regulated so that I would argue that average salaries are kept "artificially" low.
Medical services are highly valued by society for obvious reasons, and the level of required training is extremely high. If the market was left to its own devices I have little doubt that doctors in Europe would earn much more than they do now. Of course that does not mean that healthcare would be better on average, in fact most likely the opposite, but the question is about doctors' income.
> Entry to medical school is also extremely competitive in Western Europe and there are also limits on number of places in some countries. And there are shortages of doctors as well.
USA has much less doctors per capita than Europe though, so the problem isn't the same. It would be nice to have more doctors in Europe, but in USA it is a critical problem.
Maybe so but the point is that in Europe if the number of doctors per capita dropped salaries would not go up, that would require a political decision. But since admissions are already ultra competitive there would be no need to attract even more candidates, rather they would try to lower the bar or 'import' more foreign doctors where possible. So that's why salaries in Europe are lower than in the US.
Conversely, I am not convinced that more doctors in the US would lead to a big drop in earnings assuming the market there is 'freer' than in Europe. It's a rich country and healthcare is very valuable with high barriers to entry in any case.
Where do doctors in Europe end up in terms of salary compared to other professions in Europe? Are they in the same percentile as US doctors, but just everyone in Europe earns less or do European doctors also earn less than some other professions that earn less in the US than US doctors?
> Are they in the same percentile as US doctors, but just everyone in Europe earns less
Europe is a big target, and there is quite a bit of variability country-to-country, but in general I would say yes. For example, in France the median physician salary is €120k/year and the median software engineer salary is €55k/year. So the median physician makes 2.1x the median developer.
In the US you have a median of $110k for SWE and a median of $255k for physicians (NOT 350k, as I've addressed on HN previously - see the US CES data [1]). So about 2.3x.
Well, if doctors' salaries in the US are in line with general salaries compred to Europe then the whole article is moot. And that might be the case, indeed.
The USA also has significantly more doctors per capita than the ither Anglophone countries (Canada, UK, Australia, NZ) and still has higher cost of care and worse healthcare outcomes than any of them.
I've been saying this for a long time: doctor scarcity is a red herring. Training more physicians or nurse practitioners or physician assistants will not bring down healthcare costs.
Source for your first claim? All the charts I’ve seen online (see [1] for an example) show that the other Anglophone countries you’ve listed now have more doctors per capita than the US. (It looks like this was not the case in the past.)
It’s not as competitive. I had classmates who were rejected by every Canadian and US medical school and ended up going to Ireland or France instead. (The one who went to France was a French national. The ones who went to Ireland were not Irish.)
> Lots of people want to train as doctors: over 85,000 people take the medical-college admission test each year, and more than half of all medical-school applicants are rejected
But I believe that this means applications with a Bachelor degree.
In France, the system is different. Students go to 1st year medical school after highschool where there is a massive selection with limited number of places to get to 2nd year. Only 15-25% of students get to 2nd year, taking into account that only good students will attend 1st year to start with.
In the UK admission rate in 1st year (afte highschool) is about 15%, again taking into account that those who are not straight-As students probably don't bother applying to start with.
This does not sound less competitive. If your French classmate had a bachelor degree but went back to 1st year in France that might have given him an advantage over students fresh out of highschool.
In any case, according to the article it is the shortage of qualified profesisonals that should ultimately impact salaries, and there are shortages. But, again, salaries tend to be in effect regulated one way of another, which I think has much more of an impact.
I don't think that's key.
In Europe healthcare tends to be socialised and heavily regulated so that I would argue that average salaries are kept "artificially" low.
Medical services are highly valued by society for obvious reasons, and the level of required training is extremely high. If the market was left to its own devices I have little doubt that doctors in Europe would earn much more than they do now. Of course that does not mean that healthcare would be better on average, in fact most likely the opposite, but the question is about doctors' income.