Ouch. Worse than I thought. I suppose it's correlated to eventual revenue— doctors aren't nearly as rich in Europe, although they are clearly among the top earn

Ouch. Worse than I thought. I suppose it's correlated to eventual revenue— doctors aren't nearly as rich in Europe, although they are clearly among the top earners. (what filoleg suggests in the other reply) There's an underlying premise, I think, that countries like France or Germany seek to minimize the cost of healthcare in general, because the bill is collectively paid— the bottom line is a direct cost on GDP, that's what mutualizing bills means i.e. "social security", beyond that the whole socialistic apparel of redistribution of (some % of) wealth. Artificially inflating any of these mutual bills simply means that some (people, corporations, the medical field entirely including drugs and supplies) would take more than they should from all others, financially. Starting with having to buy their way in the field (exactly the kind of artificial gating that modern democracies sought to remove, historically; long-term it's no better than saying "voting costs $100k per person"). It's a form of inner competition at a national level, because the enrichment of some hampers the velocity of the whole towards the core mission. It's a huge distraction, at best. In layman terms: because I'm gonna charge 200 instead of 100, the country can only buy N/2 worth of what I do. If "I" is the entire field of medicine drugs/supplies/infra, we only cure half what we could, but I personally get 2x profits. It's wrong on every level when we're talking about mutual bills. But in the USA, the bills are not (yet) mutualized, not enough of them... so there is no incentive to keep costs low and treat as much as we could, because microeconomically, it makes more sense for the field of medicine to increase its relative profit. Unless you add the macroeconomic coupling, that bills are mutualized and everybody pays them at the end of the day, it just can't / won't change imho.