Why doctors in America earn so much

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (aamc), in a decade America will have a shortage of up to 124,000 doctors. This makes no sense. The profession is lavishly paid: $350,000 is the average salary according to a recent paper by Joshua Gottlieb, an economist at the University of Chicago, and colleagues. Lots of people want to train as doctors: over 85,000 people take the medical-college admission test each year, and more than half of all medical-school applicants are rejected. And yet there is a shortage of doctors. What is going on? For many Americans, the doctor shortage has already arrived. More than 100m people today live in an area without enough primary-care doctors (the problem is particularly bad in rural areas). For mental health things are even worse: half of Americans live in an area with a shortage of mental-health professionals. With less than than three physicians for every 1,000 people, America is behind most other wealthy countries, despite spending

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (aamc), in a decade America will have a shortage of up to 124,000 doctors. This makes no sense. The profession is lavishly paid: $350,000 is the average salary according to a recent paper by Joshua Gottlieb, an economist at the University of Chicago, and colleagues. Lots of people want to train as doctors: over 85,000 people take the medical-college admission test each year, and more than half of all medical-school applicants are rejected. And yet there is a shortage of doctors. What is going on? For many Americans, the doctor shortage