As he took me through an interactive map on his computer screen, Oakland physician Nate Gross showed me what a neurosurgeon in my area might expect to make. Scrolling his cursor over the D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, Maryland, a number appeared: $580,000. I knew that, vaguely, but I did gasp. "But if you move down to South Carolina," Gross continued, scrolling south, "here, you're looking at $645,000." In an even more drastic example, the average anesthesiologist practicing in Massachusetts would increase her salary by 61 percent if she moved to Wisconsin.
