I dug out some data on the top 17 countries in terms of what doctors earn. The data divides the doctors into two groups (A) general practice and (B) specialist. These may or may not be exactly comparable, but this is the best data that I could find. The data shows the doctors average annual pay and compares that to the average annual pay of the countries population. I think that they use GNP as the basis.
Country General Ratio Specialist Ratio
Netherlands $117K 3.6 $253K 6.0
Australia 91K 3.6 247K 7.6
USA 161K 4.1 230K 5.7
Belgium 61K 2.0 188K 6.0
Canada 107K 3.4 161K 5.1
UK 118K 3.9 150K 4.9
France 92K 3.1 149K 5.0
Ireland 90K 2.8 143K 4.0
Switzerland 116K 3.4 130K 3.8
Denmark 109K 3.4 91K 2.9
New Zealand 78K 3.2 89K 3.6
Germany 69K 2.2 77K 2.7
Norway 69K 1.2 77K 1.9
Sweden 66K 2.2 76K 2.5
Finland 68K 2.3 74K 2.5
Greece 60K 2.7 67K 3.2
Now, you have the data. So what does it mean? Who has the most affordable doctors? That was our original question. It looks like Norway has the most affordable doctors and the USA has the least affordable doctors. We already know that our general practice doctors make the most money and it is clear that we don't earn enough to afford them compared to the rest of the civilized world. Are you starting to better understand the problem? Do you think a program like Obamacare, that focusses on insurance with make the ratio better or worse? Easy one----Worse!
The role of specialists, if we were to follow the Henry Ford model, should reduce the cost, but it appears that it increases the cost. Interesting! Denmark has some interesting data. There the specialist makes "less" than the general practice doctor. I am not sure why, but it maybe that the specialist is only qualified in a narrow area of medicine. The model for the USA is to "add" the skills of the specialist on top of the general practice doctor. I have blogged before that this is not logical and only makes medicine more expensive without adding any benefits. It appears that most of the world does it like the USA model because specialist always are paid more.
The big thing about this data is that it shows that many countries who have longer life expectancies have medical doctors that are twice as affordable as here in the USA. How would you like to buy a new car for half price in the USA or a new home? That is the kind of thing that we are talking about. I will have some more comments when I complete some more research.
