From the NYT this AM comes a story about the high cost of medical care in the USA. Yeah, it's the NYT, but the issue they bring up (disparities in doctors' pay) is something I have wondered about myself.

I have dual nationality, and the other one is the UK, so I've long been interested in why the US can't do something like the UK National Health Service. In Michael Moore's "Sicko", one of the first scenes is an interview with a UK doctor, who makes a decent salary for his work and seems pretty happy. I have doctors in my extended family, and while most of my relatives are ornery cusses, I never heard they bad mouth the NHS. They too were respectably middle class, so I know the interviewee isn't an outlier.

The spending ratio between the two countries is about 2:1, and I'd really like to know why. There are plenty of other drivers of our absurd medical spending (insurance company profit margins, prescription drug costs, shady hospital billing practices) but salaries is a new one to me.

So why would doctor's salaries be higher in the USA? Here is a list of possibilities, and maybe those who have studied it more deeply than I can chime in below.

• Student Debt? It looks like doctors in the UK have high levels of student debt, but not quite as high as doctors in the US (roughly 40%). So maybe lower debt loads is part of the problem. Of course, this doesn't include undergraduate debt too, but that appears to be similar these days. Still, unlike US student debt, UK student debt is indexed to inflation.
• Malpractice Insurance? Despite what you may have heard from the MSM, this is actually pretty low in the US. Nevertheless, the NHS provides medical (but not disciplinary) indemnity, so this seems to be cheaper too. But not a whole lot.
• Lifestyle? This one is my own half-baked idea. In the UK, there is a much stronger safety net, so there is no need to be greedy in order to "self-insure" against calamity. This may also help to keep salaries down.

This is where the numbers stand:

• Insurance profit: 10%.
• Drug costs: 5%.
• Hospital overbilling: ? (Has this even been studied?)
• Salary ratios: ? (The Upshot article did not attribute the spending impact of the salary differences.)

We have 35% still to go and I'm hoping these last two items will close the gap significantly. Then we have to explain why the salaries are so different.