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Comment by jesuscript | Hacker News Reader

I think even their doctors are paid lower than US counterparts. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

There’s two ways to look at this. The first way is the shallow way, the raw numbers. The other way is that Europeans have a better social ethics and don’t need the gaudy numbers. Americans do. We don’t have a real culture of social welfare. We value capitalism unlike any other country in the world.

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Medical licenses are controlled by cartels in the US. They lobby the government to limit the number of residencies so we end up in a situation where only 40% of people who apply to medical school get in since they can't expand until the number of residency slots increases.

Yes, people in the medical field (doctors, nurses, administrators) are generally paid far lower than in the U.S. it’s one of the ways that European countries are able to spend so much less on healthcare than the U.S.

Euro doctors are significantly underpaid. Euro knows this and the reason you don’t see doctors coming to the USA is that the medical board would require them to retest. Indian doctors don’t mind so they come over and study again.

My hope is the USA changes the law so doctors from Western Europe countries can freely emigrate to the USA and practice for significantly more money. There’s no reason the USA shouldn’t drain Europe of this talent by offering far more money to these workers.

Licensure of physicians in the U.S. is controlled by medical associations through state licensing agencies. They have an incentive to limit the number of people who receive licenses to practice medicine.

They also control the number of new doctors through strict control of the number of new medical colleges and seats

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