I'm a bit confused.. are people suggesting that the poor pay in the EU is a _good_ thing? These aren't lawn maintenance or car mechanics here. We're talking about saving peoples lives. I would think the people in the EU would feel a bit of shame for paying them so poorly..
[disclaimer] my wife works in pediatric cardiology and saving kids lives seems worth a hell of a lot more than a software jockey job. The dead baby days are the worst and make a rough merge or code deployment appear as trivial as they really are. The EU should be ashamed of paying their people so poorly. None of that is to say that our system isn't broken and wasteful. It certainly needs fixing. But paying critical care givers less is a really bad suggestion.
Income equals expenditure. They are one and the same.
I had an endoscopy done, 15 minute procedure where they put you under. The bill came and the anesthesiologist charged $980 for those 15 minutes. And there was a gastroenterologist and two nurses in the room as well. While I understand that my life was literally in that professional's hands for those 15 minutes (i truly do get and respect that) I don't think "affordable healthcare" is compatible with billing almost a grand for 15 minutes of work. Whether my premiums pay it, or my taxes pay it, or I pay out of pocket, as long as people are charging $4k an hour, it's not going to be affordable. Simple as that.
You aren’t paying for the 15 mins. You are paying for the 20 years that got them qualified and the couple of times per year when shit gets wild and they do more than read the news.
Over paid? Yes. Worth their pay and 10x more when it goes bad. Yes.
So is Germany. But they pay less. And their outcomes aren't worse. So we're overpaying. Probably more precisely: we're unnecessarily restricting the supply of physicians, which is the same thing.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1094939/physician-earnin...?