There is a huge disconnect between people who work in other industries who have no issue taking huge salaries (I forum searched and learned that your wife made over $250k a year a few years back working for a publicly traded company with stock options), and those people turning around and lamenting that people in health care make too much. You want to have a high standard of living, but somehow want to deny that to the people who will literally save your life someday. Your family's high salary causes the product that your wife's former company produces to be more expensive. And guess what, it's probably a product that hospitals purchase. I wonder what drives up those prices. Your wife's high salary makes it more expensive for consumers (such as nurses in the $40-80k range) to be able to afford consumer goods AND HEALTHCARE. I find the greed and dangling of carrot analogies of attracting doctors and caregivers to be hilarious. If we are going to go all socialized medicine (which I support) and cut salaries (which I don't support), there needs to be an across the board (European socialized society) taxed and flattened salary range for all of society. Otherwise we are just asking health care workers to be serfs.
Ask any health care worker what drives up the cost of health care and they will tell you its insurance, hospital administrators (who often pull in > $2 MM per year) and unreasonable expectations of patients and families ("please save my 89 yr old granny!!! Do whatever it takes!"). I'm pretty sure its not paying nurses an extra $2 per hour to work overnight on Christmas eve Saturday.
I didn't say doctor salaries were the main issue, just that I thought doctors and nurses are paid a bit more in the USA than some other countries (we have already established these other countries have half the health care costs of the USA). $250K as a senior software engineer after decades of work on the west coast is pretty easy but plenty of other professions with similar education (Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Brown) as my wife make far more than that in management, sales, legal, etc. Doctors who work at drug companies make fat buck...on the order of millions per year, even if the drug fails. They also get stock options so for those few drugs that work, the doctors at the drug company make tens or hundreds of millions.
A nurse makes 50k a year and a baseball player makes 10 million a year. $250k falls somewhere in-between.
Insurance companies are making some serious profit here but if it were at obscene levels then the best investment for any of us would be a insurance ETF, which has not been true at all (FANG anyone?). You could probably knock out the insurance companies from the equation and the USA would still have 1.9x the cost of other countries on healthcare instead of 2x.
Edit: I did look it up and it looks like for GP, the USA is the highest paid doctor salary in the world at roughly 35% higher than the next highest country ($161k in the USA vs $118k in the UK). So it is a factor even if a minor factor. Just toss it in the mix with all the other stuff like insane drug prices, insurance company profiteering, high malpractice costs from lawsuits, overpaid hospital executives, a very unhealthy USA population in general and there you go, 2x the price of everyone else. Simple.
Oh one more edit: Why are nurses paid so much less than doctors? If you can answer that, then you can figure out why a senior software engineer with 20 years of experience in a hot field might make $250k while another IT worker who graduated last year from a 2 year online degree might make $50k. Also cost of living on the west coast can make salaries double. I bet a nurse in Silicon valley makes more than $50k a year. Hah I just looked it up on glassdoor:
The average salary for a Registered Nurse is $123,762 in San Francisco, CA. Salaries estimates are based on 694 salaries submitted anonymously to Glassdoor by Registered Nurse employees in San Francisco, CA.