I don't think they get paid enough.
Medical costs (especially those total costs you cite) are huge! No doubt! But this isn't caused by the doctors. Sure, some get big bucks, but consider the level of expertise and how much schooling and learning they've done, it does make sense.
As long as we are a capitalist system, and people are free to choose the work they want to do, and that work is rewarded or not in the marketplace, those who have intelligence and stamina—a hard work ethic—will ALWAYS make the most money.
Otherwise the government (or some people collectively) get involved and the next thing you know you have mandated price controls on medical treatment, shortages, huge costs that always come to the maximum the government will pay and worst of all death panels, as government budgets are not unlimited and somebody has to say “No” (the government).
You don't say No, your doctor doesn't say No but the government, as the payer, gets to say No and in time of political corruption and punishment, THAT decision might not be based on cost but rather on who is asking for the treatment (shudder--just think upon how EVIL those Republicans and their supporters are! /s).
So many of my European friends shake their heads at our American system and simply do not understand why all doctors and medical professionals are not government employees. Well, it is a matter of time. Welfare, Medicaid, Medicare and now Obamacare has or is going to turn doctors into government employees. So I ask them, what is the incentive to get young people to want to be doctors in their countries? Well, the answer is it is just another job, however, not for the best and brightest, the more eager and ambitious, the harder working and those with more perseverance; no, their doctors are just 9-to-5 employees and slobs like the rest of us. They make a hell of a lot more mistakes and treatment times are way longer--if they can get them--than ours.
Still, we can't say our system is any better today, because we are on the cusp of crushing the American incentive to be a doctor, and make it just another job somebody has to do. Our legal system has leached onto the medical world to make every decision a doctor can make a potential suing point, so that every test must be run, every procedure signed and approved, and no doctor gets to truly make heroic decisions to help his patient any longer. Every medical decision is based on potential liability and not health and healing. Those doctors and hospitals pay a fortune daily to the malpractice insurance companies just for the privilege of trying to fix us when we're broke without any guarantee that anything humanly possible will work in the end. These insurance companies are often making enormous payouts to the perfect-haired John Edwards type trial lawyers, building their massive mansions and screwing and getting pregnant their campaign managers while their wives die of cancer all while being gushed upon by the Driveby Media for bringing up TWO Americas that you helped CREATE(ok, got carried away on Edwards a tad...)
I would not want to be a doctor if MY life depended on it.
First....I luuuuvvvved the Edwards description. Looked like something I would write.
Not that you should be proud of that.
I misspoke in my first post. I do not think doctors, or most medical people are overpaid.
And quit telling me that’s what I said. Who do I think I am, Obama?
Nobody benefitted more than my husband by a brave doctor who refused to open up his skull, that what was in his brain was an infection. It would take many months of 4-times-a-day intravenous antibiotics to clear it up but opening his skull would serve no purpose.
Not that brain surgery was a cheaper alternative I must suppose, but it was this doctor who I feel saved Billy’s life. He did his job, and he was good at it.
It’s just that on any one medical case it seems like there’s a whole team of all sorts of varieties involved....I dunno, my experience probably isn’t typical.
It’s like everything requires tons of tests, many specialist visits, tests, tests....the whole MEDICAL process of ....health care, is ponderous....that’s my view of it.