A common complaint in the American healthcare debate is that physicians make too much money, and that their pay is a major reason healthcare is so expensive. But a U.S. surgeon recently spent an administrative day crunching the numbers, and he argues the reality doesn't match the outrage.
“Physician salaries account for roughly 8.6% of total healthcare costs [in the U.S.],” the surgeon wrote in a Reddit post on r/Salary. “It's around 10% in Canada, 15% in Germany, 11% in France, 11.6% in Australia, and 9.7% in the UK.”
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A Closer Look At The Numbers
He also did his own calculations using Canadian healthcare spending figures. Canada spent $372 billion on healthcare last year. With an average physician salary of $384,000 and 97,384 physicians nationwide, the total salary cost works out to about $37.4 billion—roughly 10% of total healthcare spending.
That figure aligns closely with the U.S., suggesting that doctors' share of healthcare spending isn't uniquely bloated in America. “This just means that our healthcare system as a whole is riddled by parasites such as insurance companies and admin,” he added.
Critics often argue that U.S. physicians earn much more than their international peers. But when the Reddit poster compared salaries of engineers, teachers, lawyers and plumbers in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and France, he found similar ratios to physician salaries across all professions.
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For example, the ratio of physician to engineer pay was 2.7 in the U.S., compared to 3.2 in Canada and 1.9 in Germany. When it came to teachers, the ratio was 4.1 in the U.S. and 4.7 in Canada. “It seems like Germany underpays teachers relative to physicians, but the USA is very close to France and Canada,” he noted.
So What's Actually Driving Costs?
Commenters overwhelmingly agreed that doctors aren't the problem. “Healthcare is now the largest employer in the country and it’s got very little to do with doctors, nurses and surgeons,” one person wrote. “It's admin. It's always been admin,” said another. “There are, what, a dozen administrators per doctor in the average hospital?”
Medical equipment sales, pharmaceutical pricing, and insurance company practices were also frequently blamed. “Stryker (NYSE:SYK) generated +$20 billion in 2024,” one commenter said. Another added, “We're paying double what we should for care, not 6% more.”
The thread also dug into why training more doctors isn't as simple as it sounds. Opening more residency spots requires adequate patient volume and teaching staff resources that aren’t easy to scale overnight. “You need to do X number of Y procedures to be competent,” the surgeon explained. “It’s not as easy as just ‘training more doctors’. There are many moving parts.”
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Meanwhile, some emphasized the optics: the public sees doctors making six or seven figures and assumes they are to blame, even though health insurance CEOs routinely earn $20 million or more. “Physicians are easy targets,” one longtime medical professional wrote. “We are much more poorly organized than big pharma or the hospital lobby.”
Others chimed in from outside medicine. “Make a button on an app more responsive and get $500K, no one cares. Save lives and make $300K, pitchforks,” one person joked. A dentist said their patients wrongly assume they keep the entire cost of a procedure. “For a cancer procedure that costs over $20,000 before insurance, I take home $1,600. But laypeople think I take home all $20,000.”
One user summed it up plainly: “Anyone who thinks physicians make too much money is an idiot. I’m not a physician, I work in tech. But I’d rather fire every insurance company admin and funnel that money back into pay for doctors, nurses and other people doing the actual useful jobs.”
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Image: Shutterstock
