OECD Study of Physician Income in 14 Countires

"The Remuneration of General Practitioners and Specialists in 14 OECD Countries: What are the Factors Influencing Variations across Countries?
(Published 22-Dec-2008)"

This link takes you to the full PDF file of the document. It is interesting.

For primary care, most coutries get between $106k to $121K, US is $146K. Interestingly, the dreaded NHS of the UK is the $121, and France is a low outlier at only $84K! But keep looking through the graphs, they are interesting. For example, US PCP's are payed 3.4 times the average wage of our countrymen, and this is in line with the top half dozen countries or so.

Turns out the Netherlands has physician income for specialists higher than ours, by quite a bit ($290K vs $236K). But the rest of the countries fall off fairly quickly. They do not have the large disparity of specialist vs PCP income that we do.

I don't have the data (nor the skills!) to do the analysis, but I would be very interested in how wealth accumulation differs among the countries. Considering the large expense of American colleges and Medical Schools, I would make a guess that we are so far behind the eight ball when we finish our educations and training, that we probably don't catch up with our international peers until we're in our forties or fifties, except for the highly payed specialties.

So, would it be wiser to do as other countries do and heavily subsidize our educations so there is not so much pent up delayed gratification? And would that also lead to more PCPs and less income disparity among specialties?

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