Physicians' Incomes and Healthcare Costs

Source of the graph.

For obvious reasons, I have been thinking a lot about healthcare recently. One important question is, why does the United States spend so much more on healthcare than other nations do?

There are surely myriad reasons for the international differences, but part of the answer can be gleaned from this passage by Uwe Reinhardt, Gerard Anderson, and Peter Hussey (via an old post of Ezra Klein):

Although the United States now has relatively fewer physicians per 1,000 population than the OECD median, its total national spending on physicians as a percentage of GDP is double the OECD median (2.9 percent in 1999, compared with an OECD median of 1.3 percent). U.S. physician spending peaked in 1991–1992 at 3.0 percent after steadily rising from 1.7 percent in 1980. Since 1992 spending has more or less hovered around 3 percent. OECD median spending has been mostly flat over the entire period, hovering between 1.1 and 1.4 percent of total spending. As a dollar amount, U.S. per capita spending for physician services was the highest in the OECD in 1999: $988, compared with an OECD median of $342. Physician services accounted for 22.7 percent of total U.S. health spending in 1999, compared with 15.2 percent in the median OECD country.

Physicians’ incomes are much higher in the United States than they are in other OECD countries. In 1996, the most recent year for which data are available for multiple countries, the average U.S. physician income was $199,000. The comparable OECD median physician income was $70,324. The ratio of the average income of U.S. physicians to average employee compensation for the United States as a whole was about 5.5. Germany’s was the next highest, at only 3.4; Canada, 3.2; Australia, 2.2; Switzerland, 2.1; France, 1.9; Sweden, 1.5; and the United Kingdom, 1.4.

One can think of several reasons why physician compensation in the United States is relatively more generous than elsewhere. First, physicians in most other nations face a powerful single buyer (monopsony) for health services. As the McKinsey Global Institute and Mark Pauly have shown, market power (or regulation) translates into relatively lower prices for health services, including the services of physicians. Second, U.S. physicians must make a larger financial investment in their education than their counter parts in many other countries do; they must recover the debt they incur as part of the educational process. Third, the incomes of highly skilled health care workers—notably physicians—are determined partly with reference to the incomes that equally able and skilled professionals can earn elsewhere in the economy. Because the U.S. distribution of earned income for all occupations is wider than it is in most other OECD countries, the relatively high incomes offered skil led professionals in the United States may well have served to pull up the incomes of American physicians relative to the incomes of their peers abroad.

Based on this reading, and in particular on the three hypotheses outlined in their last paragraph, here are some questions for class discussion:

On the issue of monopsony power: Explain how a large government healthcare plan (a "single payer" being the extreme case) could potentially reduce the wages of healthcare workers and thereby national healthcare costs. What are the similarities and differences between this solution to high healthcare costs and a targeted income tax surcharge levied only on healthcare providers (the revenue from which is rebated to all taxpayers)? Are the policies you considered above efficient, using the economist's standard definition of efficiency? Are they equitable, as judged by your own notion of fairness? In your opinion, does your analysis argues for or against a government-run healthcare plan?

On the issue of doctor training: Suppose that in country A physicians get free training through a taxpayer-financed educational system, while in country B physicians finance their own education and then, once trained, are paid higher fees. If country A classifies these training expenses as education rather than healthcare spending, which country would report higher healthcare costs? Is that difference in healthcare costs real or an artifact of labeling? In which country would doctors, once trained, have more incentive to work long hours? In which country would there be more doctors? Which country's system, in your judgment, is more efficient and equitable?

On the issue of inequality: Do you think that the provision of medical services uses more or less human capital than does the typical job in the economy? What does your answer imply about the relative price of healthcare looking across countries with varying degrees of economic inequality? In the United States, the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers has increased substantially over the past several decades. Other things equal, what does this fact imply about the trend in the relative price of healthcare? If public policy were to try to prevent this change in the price of healthcare without addressing the underlying trend in wage inequality, what effects would the policy have?

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Addendum: These broad issues apply not just to doctors but to other skilled healthcare workers as well. If you look here, you will find that dentists, nurses, and physiotherapists are also paid more in the United States than in other nations. By contrast, relatively unskilled workers such as chambermaids and bus drivers do not get much advantage working in the United States.