> 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
But I believe that this means applications with a Bachelor degree.
In France, the system is different. Students go to 1st year medical school after highschool where there is a massive selection with limited number of places to get to 2nd year. Only 15-25% of students get to 2nd year, taking into account that only good students will attend 1st year to start with.
In the UK admission rate in 1st year (afte highschool) is about 15%, again taking into account that those who are not straight-As students probably don't bother applying to start with.
This does not sound less competitive. If your French classmate had a bachelor degree but went back to 1st year in France that might have given him an advantage over students fresh out of highschool.
In any case, according to the article it is the shortage of qualified profesisonals that should ultimately impact salaries, and there are shortages. But, again, salaries tend to be in effect regulated one way of another, which I think has much more of an impact.
USA has much less doctors per capita than Europe though, so the problem isn't the same. It would be nice to have more doctors in Europe, but in USA it is a critical problem.
Conversely, I am not convinced that more doctors in the US would lead to a big drop in earnings assuming the market there is 'freer' than in Europe. It's a rich country and healthcare is very valuable with high barriers to entry in any case.
Europe is a big target, and there is quite a bit of variability country-to-country, but in general I would say yes. For example, in France the median physician salary is €120k/year and the median software engineer salary is €55k/year. So the median physician makes 2.1x the median developer.
In the US you have a median of $110k for SWE and a median of $255k for physicians (NOT 350k, as I've addressed on HN previously - see the US CES data [1]). So about 2.3x.
I've been saying this for a long time: doctor-scarcity is a red herring. Training more physicians or nurse practitioners or physician assistants will not bring down healthcare costs.
[1] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/b39949d7-en/index.html?i...
I don't think that's key.
In Europe healthcare tends to be socialised and heavily regulated so that I would argue that average salaries are kept "artificially" low.
Medical services are highly valued by society for obvious reasons, and the level of required training is extremely high. If the market was left to its own devices I have little doubt that doctors in Europe would earn much more than they do now. Of course that does not mean that healthcare would be better on average, in fact most likely the opposite, but the question is about doctors' income.