A comment on the financial resources of US physicians: physicians are relatively underpaid, when you consider the cost most invest in their education (approaching $200,000 at a public school - you can't work part-time in medical school so they need living expenses, and you need a car to get to all the clinics & hospitals you're expected to go to), plus the fact that for 4 years of medical school you completely forgo any salary, then for 3 years of residency you get paid enough to live on ($40,000 or so) and not enough if you have to start paying back your loans, which thanks to changes in the laws, more people have to do during their residency). Many also continue on into advanced training (another 3 or more years), during which they get paid slightly more than during their residency.

Once in practice, a physician often puts in 50-60 hours at the office, including being on-call, and another few hours at a minimum at home, reviewing charts and keeping up on the literature relevant to their field. Some doctors don't do as good a job on this, but others are quite diligent.

I know people with 4 year BAs and nothing more who make 120,000-150,000K which is about what most physicians make. Lawyers, after only 3 years of law school, can get positions making 75,000 - 80,000 and this quickly increases if the law firm finds their work to be good (and if the lawyer is putting in 50+ hours/week).

I'm not saying that doctors are living at poverty status, but when you consider all they invest in their education, a forgone salary for 7-10 years, and the hours they put into their job once they get into private practice, it's not a huge amount. These people are quite intelligent and had they wanted, they could have gone the corporate route and have been making far more than they make as a physician, without all the years of forgoing a decent salary. (Now, compared to graduate students and post-docs, and what they can expect to make after just as rigourous and time-demanding of an education to train them to work in a university setting, physicians are VERY well paid. Many top-notch university professors who regularly put in 60+ hours a week into their teaching and research are not making even $80,000, even at top research institutions. As they move higher up the professor rank, their salary increases, but it takes a while.)