The barriers to entry are high: 4 years of undergraduate education, 4 years in med school, 3 to 7 years of residency. Those years are very expensive, with the average med school graduate student piling up $250k of student loans. And if you've ever watched a friend go through med school and residency you'll know it's life-consuming; they are immersed in work and miss out on years of socializing and culture. The payoff at the end had better be commensurate or nobody will be a doctor.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Those years are very expensive, with the average med school graduate student piling up $250k of student loans.
Which, is turn, makes the healthcare industry extremely expensive in the US compared to just about any other developed country on earth. Add to that health insurance company profits and insane medicine prices. Very broken.
You can become a doctor of anything useless to society. It's expensive to become a doctor of medicine in the USA. The system is broken. Where I live, these practitioners make much less and their education was paid for by the state. Their salaries are much lower.
The state is you. You're paying for their education either way, either through exorbitant salary or higher tax burden.
Yes, but their salary is lower because they have no loans to repay and they don't bill insurance companies. You see, there are three things missing here that exist in the United States that artificially make the salary higher: 1) universal corporate health care 2) student loans 3) university tuition and fees. My taxes pay for the doctors' education. When they graduate and get a job, my taxes pay their salary. My taxes also pay for all things related to health care. The result? It's all cheaper, including doctors' salaries. I don't have to pay a dime if I go to the doctor when I have a health problem. It isn't magic. It makes sense. Remove private corporations from the scene and the cost is lower. Also, make higher education available to everyone who is intellectually capable and the cost is lower. Oh yeah, where I live, you can't become a doctor just because your mom and dad have lots of money. You have to take a state-approved exam when you graduate from high school. If you score high enough you can study to become a doctor. There's a cut-off score. And this is why doctors travel from this country to the USA to work. They take advantage of the ridiculously high salary and have no student loan debt to pay back.
I don’t have to pay a dime if I go to the doctor
My taxes pay for the doctors’ education ... their salary ... all things related to health care.
You do pay to go to the doctor; you simply pay in advance through taxes. Their salaries are lower partly because you paid for their education. And depending on your country your taxes may also be paying for their office space, their equipment, their retirement pensions, etc. In the end you pay for everything, whether directly or indirectly.
Also doctors eat a lot of shit from patients. I think they all deserve a 100K raise just for listening to antivaxxers throughout the COVID pandemic. Imagine the emotional energy it takes to hear someone accuse you of withholding the "right" treatment (ivermectin) while their family member is in a bed with their lungs stiffening on ECMO and could have been saved with a simple shot. Watching the world devolve into social media driven intellectual rot should is terrible.
TL;DR: We’re not training up new doctors in high enough quantities, and we have a supply / demand problem.
You might consider the amount of money owed after completing the medical degree. They get that salary to pay back loans.
That’s also addressed in the article.
The question should be why does everyone else make so little. Seriously, if $350,000 is the expected pay after up to 12 years of higher-education and residency, then someone with a 4-year degree should be making about $110,000, which would be slightly double what minimum wage should be ($25 an hour) if it kept up with cost of living and inflation. This is what a prosperous country should expect.
Laziness.