This is also true of course, but i'm using "best" more colloquially - let's assume it's top 10%. That would match the rough stratification of doctor salaries (

This is also true of course, but i'm using "best" more colloquially - let's assume it's top 10%. That would match the rough stratification of doctor salaries (accounting for specialization, etc). The average primary care family physician earns 350k in the us. The top 10% earn 1.3 million. The top 1% earn 4 million[1]. So enough people are hiring the best, or paying the best, to get a 4x difference and 10x difference in yearly pay. I chose family PCP's because it seemed more unlikely that the top family PCP should be worth 10x more than the average. Whereas in something like neurosurgery, maybe? It felt at least arguable. Happy to be shown i'm wrong here. In any case, it seems like this level of stratification would not exist if people weren't trying to get to see the "top" doctors all the time. [1] There are lots of different data sources, but they all roughly have the same relative stratification even if the exact numbers are different. Since the actual numbers don't really matter to the point i'm making, i didn't try harder. But i will say all the data I find seems a bit of a mess.