The US has placed great emphasis on the importance of healthcare, which is why we decided to gather information about the 18 highest paying cities for doctors. Healthcare is probably one of the most important, if not the most important field in the world. After all, it is the reason behind not only us living longer but living a healthy life as well.
In fact, the United States is the third best country in the world when it comes to paying doctors. However, this isn’t because the government pays its doctors and physicians or it values them extremely highly. The reason behind this is the fact that healthcare in America is extremely expensive for the average person and due to the exorbitant rates charged, allows physicians to earn a healthy amount of money.
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There is an interesting reason behind the outrageous rates charged in the US. America generally has employer-based insurance. This means that instead of a hospital billing the patient directly, as you would assume, it is instead the insurance company which is billed. And if insurance companies are famous for one thing, it is haggling. Hence, insurance companies will try their best to lower the price so that it will cost them less. Since they have the power to do so, they can often lower the bill.
The hospitals have realized this and since most of their billings are made to insurance companies, they have simply raised their prices extremely high in order to get the insurance company to pay what they want. So in reality, when you pay thousands of dollars for a minor procedure, it is not because that is the cost of the procedure, it’s because most people simply don’t know these are made-up prices. Now the person who gets caught in the fight between a large hospital and a large insurance company is the average uninsured citizen, who does not have the time or the power to lower the prices. He will be paying through the nose even for a simple procedure. In fact, people often quote the fact that instead of a surgery here, it would be cheaper to fly to Europe, have the surgery performed there, stay for a week in a hotel and then return. This speaks volumes about the cost of healthcare in this country, especially compared with other developed countries where healthcare is free, like in most of Western Europe as well as Canada. However, America has failed to adopt that measure, mainly because of the citizens of the country don’t want to pay additional taxes which would be necessary to allow the government to adopt such a policy.
Of course, this has led to handsome salaries for physicians, though they can vary greatly from state to state, as evidenced in the 17 highest paying states for doctors. We have determined the highest paying cities for doctors through ValuePenguin, which has calculated the average salaries paid in the metropolitan cities in the country.
Without further ado, here are the best cities to be a doctor in, starting with number 18.