What do you consider to be &#x27;&#x27;absurd salaries&#x27;&#x27;?  A friend of mine is a hard working (50 hours&#x2F;week) 35 year old GP in San Francisco and makes about $175k all-in, which is about the same as the average base + cash bonus (excluding options) of all our white collar friends (mostly software developers, but also some in finance and other fields).  He left medical school with about $50k in student debt (very low relative to the average) and only started a &#x27;&#x27;real&#x27;&#x27; job at 30 (8 years after his peer group, who by then had accumuluated savings of several hundred thousand dollars each).<p>I also know a neurosurgeon who makes significantly more than this but given the sacrifices required to train into and hold that job, I&#x27;m not sure any amount of money would be fair compensation.<p>Medicine is unique in that you have to pay providers higher salaries to work in more remote, less desirable locations, which is the opposite of how most professions are structured.  But without this, rural populations would have almost no access to specialist care.