Other doctors came to Bryan for the money. “Nobody will lie about that,” the Parkview surgeon Mike Liu said. Rural areas were forced to pay a premium to attract talent, so much so that doctors could make a third more in Bryan than they could in many metro areas of the United States. Bryan doctors were rich—a vast change from the 1930s, when a doctor in the region could expect to take home about $45,000 in 2019 dollars—not only because of the high salaries, but because the cost of living in Bryan was so low. That attracted young doctors like Liu, who were carting around a couple of hundred
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