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German doctors have much lower school debt and relatively lower tort exposure. Salaries in Germany are significantly lower across the board, so German physicians enjoy similar financial positioning relative to other professionals, and high social status.

Any attempt to reduce physician salaries in the US is going to have to also address medical school debt and physician insurance requirements & administrative overhead.

I grew up there and the doctors I knew had very nice houses and cars. Maybe they were not as rich as of US doctors but certainly pretty well paid.

Do you have a citation for that? The sources I found suggest that’s the starting salary and it goes up considerably.

Some doctors are paid that little in Germany. Here’s an comparative analysis on 2008 data: average net outflows to physicians are higher, but it seems like US physicians may be receiving a substantially larger slice of the budgetary pie https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2010....

That shows MDs making almost twice what you claimed ($130k vs. $70k). Not as high as Americans but that seems insufficient to explain the huge cost differential.