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U.S. doctors’ salaries have been higher than anywhere else in the world for the last 5+ decades.

It all depends how effectively you can lobby for your rights & prevent foreign competition (and control the pipeline of new entrants / gatekeep / keep your industry profitable)




It doesn't necessarily tell us much to make comparisons across industries like that though. US doctors' salaries are paid to people who literally save lives. US tech workers' salaries are often paid to people who are working at a big firm with big past investment that found its golden goose a long time ago and has business people who have successfully defended its moat since. These are very different situations in terms of bargaining power for both personal compensation and larger scale effects like unionisation and regulatory capture.


Bad and good comparison. The bad part: unlike tech, a doctor consultation is really hard to transfer across border. The good part: the US is not a destination for doctors’ (not medical) exports. If we consider medical tourism as doctors exporting their expertise. In this case, the industry has failed to attract this additional flow and actually lost some (since many Americans will go outside of the US to seek medical professionals). All of this for the profit of some doctor’s establishment.


>(since many Americans will go outside of the US to seek medical professionals)

No, they won't. They will go to Mexican border cities for a routine dental treatment. Nothing more serious than that.

Certainly no equivalent of what various Canadian politicians have received over the years in trekking to the US, such as Chretien's secret trips to the Mayo Clinic while PM. <https://web.archive.org/web/20160624132234/http://www.ezrale...>


But we are not far now from Github being all you need to manage a global dev project. There is no “coders without borders” as there are no real borders to begin with. The only sticky things are legal issues / culture / time zones.




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