Let's not kid ourselves. Everyone making that much money forms a social class that works to reengineer society to protect themselves, doctors included. However,

Let's not kid ourselves. Everyone making that much money forms a social class that works to reengineer society to protect themselves, doctors included. However, we have engineered the system to make it look as though they deserve that much money by working students to exhaustion and saddling them with debt and poor working conditions. If we changed that, it wouldn't seem necessary to let specialists earn 250-700k+ per year. It's hard to believe that any of this is necessary or wise in a medical system. Professional guilds like lawyers and doctors also limit the number of people in the field to protect wages. The AMA has been essentially an enemy of the people that works to milk the CPT codes. The grift is that a procedure typically is X$ and takes Y hrs to perform. They recommend that some are easier and harder and create a cheap CPT code and an expensive CPT code. This seems fair. Then everyone marks all procedures that can be remotely justified as such as the expensive CPT. There are other grifts but this is one way that health care costs inflate over time.