- Cross-country administrative bloat is not a literature i know, if it even exists. As a complicating factor, I don’t know if we have too many or they have t

- Cross-country administrative bloat is not a literature i know, if it even exists. As a complicating factor, I don’t know if we have too many or they have too few. Probably us too many, but relative to what exactly? That’s hard to say. - doctors in the US are paid relatively more, generally by A LOT, but the only data I know about this is old. US doctors are not that enthused about hearing they should be paid less. - as another commenter notes, we have fewer doctors and fewer hospital beds than most other OECD countries. - related: despite what you may hear, our utilization is lower than most other oecd countries. (At least in the following dimensions: hospital visits are less frequent and are shorter.) - I don’t know of good data about doctors’ personal expenses. But there is a paper from a few years ago which looked at labor department data and found that a decent fraction of the top 1% of the income distribution in the US was made up of doctors. I may be able to find that reference and the fact I’m citing may be misremembered. - sure, doctors do have high medical school expenses and debt here relative to other countries but for anyone who is not in primary care, it’s not going to take that long to retire the debt. There are multiple specialties which pay north of $400,000 per year. - I do not think doctors’ salaries are related in a meaningful way to their debt. Which is to say: if you canceled all medical school debt tomorrow, prices for physician services would decline by about 0%. Those costs are sunk. They are not going to have a large effect on prices.