To piggyback onto this, a $250k limit affects most physicians. Hospitals will argue that a physician leaving a facility hurts the hospital because that physician will bring their patients with them. What they don't mention is that this is literally impossible for all shift work positions like emergency medicine, anesthesia, hospitalists, critical care, or radiology, among others. They don't choose their patients.

Anyway, medical noncompetes frequently target a certain number of mile radius around the hospital. In a tightly packed area like NYC, this basically locks the physician out of working for any other hospital during the non-compete period. Recently, the hospitals have become very aggressive at pushing their staff to work longer stretches of shifts with no breaks. Also, there's no overtime since they're considered exempt employees. They can get away with this because it's very difficult for their staff to leave without either moving or working locums out of the area until their non-compete times out. This doesn't work for many families if, for example, they have children or older parents to care for.

Much of the American healthcare system is now owned by private equity and they will fight tooth and nail to keep their non-competes. Healthcare workers are burning out and the non-competes eliminate much of their leverage to push for better working conditions. It's disgusting and needs to stop.

I've noticed people have no concept of what real wealth is. 250k is a mid tier software developer that doesn't even work that hard.