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Doctor's salaries are not a significant percentage of healthcare spending. What percent of spending would be required for you to consider "lion's share" to be an accurate description?
I said the lion's share goes to higher salaries and higher admin costs. The abstract of the study I linked in my comment:
The United States far outspends Canada on health care, but the sources of additional spending are unclear. We evaluated the importance of incomes, administration, and medical interventions in this difference. Pooling various sources, we calculated medical personnel incomes, administrative expenses, and procedure volume and intensity for the United States and Canada. We found that Canada spent $1,589 per capita less on physicians and hospitals in 2002. Administration accounted for the largest share of this difference (39%), followed by incomes (31%), and more intensive provision of medical services (14%). Whether this additional spending is wasteful or warranted is unknown.
31% + 39% = 70% - over two thirds of the U.S.'s increased per capita physician and hospital spend over Canada's is down to those two things. That's "the lion's share" by any measure.
Current physician salaries are 8.6% of healthcare costs per Stanford. Looking closer at your data, it seems to be very old - it's missing 15+ years of physician salary pay cuts (which have been going on yearly for decades) and 15+ years of increased administrative bloat and other factors (such as increased excess services).
If you cut physician salaries in half across the board (which simply isn't possible, if you did that some specialties would be making less than nurses, and specialties like OB with an immense malpractice burden would be financially impossible), then you would barely make a dent in total expenditures and introduce significant new problems - who is going to work weekends and holidays and nights after such a massive pay cut?
Increased administrative costs are unnecessary, expensive, and much easier to reduce.
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