Finally, someone said this. It's very rare to see putting some blame on doctors for such exorbitant medical prices in the US. I have made several comments about that on HN describing similar observation that I found. A recent example was when I went to see a doctor for ear infection. She put a otoscope in my ear, looked at it for one minute, prescribed me some anti-bacterial, and wrote up $250 for the service. The first time I came to the US, the same thing happened (I have had ear infection occasionally). I went to a hospital in NJ because my host family at the time drove me there. I didn't have insurance and they sent me to the ER department. I was charged $500.

In the US, the journey to become a doctor is made unnecessarily complicated and once people become doctors, they do gatekeeping and make sure it's equally as hard for others to become one. But the reality is that the physicians who treat garden-variety diseases can be trained much less expensively. No wonder physicians make loads of money while complaining about their massive student loan. My gf is a medical resident; my host parents in the US are both doctors; I have so many doctors as acquaintances; and I know that what they do is NOT even remotely difficult in terms of intellectual demand (only physically tiring and emotionally draining sometimes when you have to deal with difficult patients). I, as a programmer, would switch my salary with them in a heartbeat (regret leaving medical school in after second year in my home country, though I hated it at that time because of the sheer amount of rote memorization one had to do) and I do believe what I do everyday requires at least equally tasking mental load than what doctors do.