Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

[1] https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2020/CES-WP-20-23.pdf

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.)

[1] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/b39949d7-en/index.html?i...

Interesting. I was going off of 2009 data. I am quite surprised that the situation reversed in such a short period of time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com