My wife is going to make $400K+ minimum (if she does more than one day per week on-call, she will make easily $500K/year; on-call for oncology aren't difficult btw) when she's done with the fellowship. We both came from Burma (Myanmar), and she told me how unnecessarily expensive everything with medicine in the US is (including the number of years required to train to become a generic/internal medicine doctor in the US).
She is also unhappy with the fact that doctors are acting as unnecessary gatekeeper for a lot of medicines that are fairly safe to use (and are available for over-the-counter purchase in other countries like India and Burma). We have a lot of doctor friends in the US, so we know the "industry" very well. Doctors (along with pharma and insurance companies) are at least somewhat complicit in the ever-increasing prices in the US. AMA (American Medical Association) spent $24M+ in 2024 for lobbying [ https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary... ] while pharma spent 30-40x more in lobbying [ https://www.opensecrets.org/news/reports/layers-of-lobbying ].
Side note: yesterday, my wife's department (a fairly large hospital in LA metro area) was treated with steaks by pharma reps from cancer medicine company. A lot of doctors, residents and fellows were delighted with that meal to say the least. I have been to expensive (Wagyu-beef expensive) hot pot dinner hosted by another pharmacy company when my wife was just an intern at a private clinic.