Josh Barro, Columnist

Doctors as Crony Capitalists

December 14, 2012 at 6:05 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Reading Christopher Flavelle’s Bloomberg View piece on the importance of lowering doctors' compensation to control health-care costs, I come away with two reactions. One, this is an ideal issue for Republicans to capitalize on. Two, Republicans will never capitalize on it.

Republicans love to fight "crony capitalism," and doctors are the ultimate crony capitalists. Their high salaries -- more than double the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average for physicians -- are driven almost entirely by government policy. The government accounts for about half of all health-care spending in the U.S., and the government agrees to pay doctors well.