I don't believe any medical professional in Germany has wage exceeding 150k EUR yearly after taxes - doctors in the US sometimes have multiples of that, coincidentally 5x to 10x more is not unusual.
https://www.payscale.com/research/DE/Job=Physician_%2F_Docto...
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Physician_%2F_Docto...
Edit: Looking at some german articles, maybe they did not convert from eur to usd, ~80,000-100,000$ (depending on expertise etc) seems more likely for a dr working at a hospital (which is still low imho compared to US salaries...).
https://www.arzt-wirtschaft.de/wie-hoch-ist-das-gehalt-bzw-d...
Both values are taken from the parent's article and converted using Google. Of course, mostly without serious student debt
This is more accurate:
https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2020-compensation-overvie...
That is likely too low.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services provides a National Health Expenditure estimate annually. [1]
Physician and clinical services represented $772 billion out of about $3.8 trillion, so more like 20%.
Hospital services are the other big one: about $1.2 trillion.
US physicians are paid terrifically relative to their counterparts almost anywhere else, this is especially true for specialists.
In fact, physicians represent about 15% - 16% of the top 1% of income earners in the US. See table 2 from this paper: https://web.williams.edu/Economics/wp/BakijaColeHeimJobsInco... which was written using tax return data, not, e.g., self-reported income data.
[1] https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...
> In fact, physicians represent about 15% - 16% of the top 1% of income earners in the US.
This may be accurate, I'm unsure, but it wouldn't change that if US doctors were paid the same as their European counterparts, it would not make a truly significant change in overall US medical spending (this would even be true if doctors did actually make up 20% of medical expenditures, like you assert earlier).