It's not your local doctor making $250k that is in the 1%, it's the doctor who set up a diagnostic company and ordered lots of unnecessary tests and is demandin

It's not your local doctor making $250k that is in the 1%, it's the doctor who set up a diagnostic company and ordered lots of unnecessary tests and is demanding kickbacks from other healthcare suppliers, whose rent-seeking is pulling in several million a year: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/01/the-cost-conundrum http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/01/the-cost-conund... If your point was that nurse practitioners won't help that siutation a lot, then I agree (although I think nurse practitioners are still a great idea for other reasons). But I believe it's wrong to suggest this is not a real problem. Similarly, salaries for top college and hospital administrators are routinely equally and exceeding that of your $30M hedge fund manager. Perhaps even worse, they justify this based on the size of the organisations they manage, which are easily inflated by hiring lots of non-teaching, non-clinical administration staff (not to mention mergers, which also give hospitals especially more market power to extract rents). It's all financed by easy money from student loans and from insurance/Medicare that doesn't have a choice. So I totally disagree that looking at the 1% is unhelpful, because all of the things above are real problems that need to be solved even if you think inequality doesn't matter. Anyone born after about 1980 and anyone who has medical insurance or pays taxes is getting fleeced, and they're not getting better services for their money. Fixing that will make a much bigger difference in most people's lives than confiscating a bit from the hedge fund manager (though of course there's no shortage of screwed up incentives in finance to fix either).