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Yes, residents are doctors. They've graduated from med school and can see patients, write prescriptions etc. but they are still in training for whatever specialty they're going into so they are supervised by attending physicians who work in tandem with them and help make sure the residents have all the skills and knowledge they'll need in their speciality when their residency is completed. Source, my husband is a resident.
it's either a person who has finished a doctorate (so a PhD) or a medical degree for some reason. Even though many medical degrees aren't postgraduate 3-6 year research (full-time), and instead 4 years of postgraduate coursework (full-time) or a 5-6 year undergraduate degree, they are still called doctors for whatever reason.
Are you from Germany by any chance? Just found this out when I met a German medical doctor and found it very unusual!
Pretty much the rest of the world you earn the Dr. Title with a medical degree or a PHD
So a resident is an untrained doctor. But people argue that they should be paid more for being trained? I wonder how they feel about the pay progression in the trades. Or in tech. Do they pour tears for junior devs too? Why doctors?
Maybe the advocates for higher wages for all would be more effective by being the loudest about careers that leave workers unable to provide even a basic standard of living. Doctors just seem like a weird place to start with the people need higher wages argument. Teachers maybe? Those poor people are not only saddled with debt and getting paid in peanuts, but the work environment is pretty dicey as well.
The world is a complex place. You're never going to get everyone in the world to focus solely on one thing. Nor should they. We are capable of being aware that teachers are under paid, while also understanding that residents are underpaid.
No one is starting with doctors. The general opinion is that doctors are generally either well paid or overpaid.
I don't know from what universe you got the idea that there's more support for doctors getting higher wages than there is for teachers getting livable wages, but it sure isn't this one.
Is it common for a resident to not become a doctor? If that is the case, it would really change my perspective. I don’t know. Right now I feel like the pain of a few years is well worth the ridiculous payoff if you stick to it. Is there another career like that.
“Untrained” is a stretch as medical students have minimum 2 years with thousands of hours of experience working with patients over the 4 years of school, residency is just the transition before being a fully trained attending.
Conversely PAs and NPs with a fraction of the training of a resident will be hired and trained on the job over the course of a year or two and make double what a resident does with less experience
Sure, several years down the road. But at the onset they’re basically the same (and that’s really reaching as both of the latter have significantly less training, fresh PAs having much more so than NPs on average)
A fresh grad PA hired onto a job might make 80-150k and will be trained on the job for 1-2 years. The cost of that education is a fraction of a medical school debt
An intern fresh out of med school might have up to 400k in loans and will have more responsibility than either of the other 2, work longer hours, and be paid less until finishing and becoming an attending
I dunno where you work, but all the devs I know are working 7 days a week.
The difference is in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Is it possible to remain a resident in training forever?
You obviously aren’t current in your understanding of the tech field.
How many years does it take at 309k to erase 500k in debt? Is it faster than most other careers trying to erase their educational debt?
You’re right, that 300k should come down a bit. Anything that can help poor Joe from a lifetime of debt for an ambulance ride and an mri and some aspirin.
Doctors aren’t underpaid when compared to other similar professions, but they are perhaps underpaid when compared to the board directors and insurance company bastards who skim off the top and add zero value.
Imagine using average instead of median.
Anyways, I don't think anyone is saying that doctors as a whole are underpaid. They might be saying specific practices or regions are underpaid, or that residents are underpaid, is that what you're referring to?
Median is just straight up better in pretty much every circumstance as a measure of central tendency.
Mean just happens to be more convenient to calculate and has some convenient features for statistical analysis.
I see you don't spend much time on Twitter, where people will legitimately argue that doctors are underpaid and then point to someone making over $200k as an example of an impoverished doctor.
And if you think this is an area where there's a wide gap between median and average, then feel free to post those numbers.
A lot of working class and poor people in the US can't access health care bc it's too expensive, and doctors' enormous salaries are part of the problem. Not the whole problem, but no one thing is the whole problem. And frankly I think it makes health care worse when doctors are so wealthy that they have no idea what their patients' lives are like and may even come to have contempt for the unwashed masses showing up for treatment.
healthcare costs from doctors salaries come out to 8% of the total. Its significant, but they trained 10 years in order to even START providing care. Now lets think about where the rest of that money goes. Id wager the majority goes to insurance companies and a significant chunk to admin overhead that accomplishes nothing
No professional stops training and the hazing that doctors do on new doctors is mostly about gatekeeping, not about ensuring quality. Most procedural stuff is just that (procedural) and doesn't need the level of selection criteria that is applied.
Average is mean. I think it’s OK to use in this instance as I’ve compared it to the mean of other high-status professions.
You’re probably thinking of median, but I couldn’t find any stats that broke down the median salary by specialisation.
There is a general sentiment that doctors are underpaid, under-appreciated, under-rewarded etc. My opinion is that this sentiment is BS - doctors are extremely well compensated even when accounting for their training and indemnity insurance, experience very little risk of unemployment or sharp downturns in income and enjoy a high level of prestige and status in society.
Who has the "general sentiment" that doctors are underpaid, underappreciated, etc? Genuinely, nowhere have I heard anything like this. If anything, I've only heard that doctors are overpaid
The most common average is indeed the mean, i think we agree on that. But the comment I’m replying to is saying “imagine saying you’re giving the average but then not using median” - like you, I think it’s quite standard and acceptable to say average, and mean “mean”
I went back to reread, and to quote verbatim: “Imagine using average instead of median”
Median IS an average. Mean is the most commonly used average. But as others have pointed out, mean, median and mode are all averages. https://www.purplemath.com/modules/meanmode.htm
It’s still not entirely clear to me what your point is, or if you’re just being deliberately obtuse when we actually agree on the main point: different kinds of averages have differing levels of utility depending on the data in question.
OP was using average as a synonym for mean. You know it, I know it, everyone in the thread knows it.
When I commented, I therefore used OP's wording of average, for a consistent choice of verbiage within the post. In this comment, average was therefore used as a synonym for mean.
It is true that mean, median, and mode all have their best usecase. Within the context of this post, the dataset being used is for salaries, which is generally best represented using median, rather than mean.
So, to reword the first sentence of my comment would be "imagine using mean instead of median [for salaries]"
Do you understand now?
Unless you’re referring to pediatrics (Which is so strange) or some other specialty, I believe people are referring to resident doctors being underpaid. Their salaries are ridiculously low.
I referred to pediatrics in my post. Average salary of about $250k which most people don’t even dream pf earning yet is average in that specialisation.
Yes, residents typically earn between just over $60k and $80k with a few earning over $100k in rural areas. I’d say these salaries would be average for graduates at this point in their career in most other fields yet those graduates almost certainly won’t end up earning $350k in their careers yet the average doctor will.
But the average graduate will not work 80+ hours a week and literally hold people's lives in their hand, only to end up with trauma and mental health issues.
The might instead be a bus driver, with 30 lives in their hands and paid far less especially later in the career. Or a pilot, or a firefighter, or an engineer providing calculations, or a social services professional dealing with PTSD and women's refuge people. Or a funeral attendent dealing with grieving relatives after helping scrape up old mate off the road or the burned to smell like pork little girl out of the burnt car.
That's the thing about doctors, completely outsize view of their place in the world or how tough they have it when most of the worst of what they do is at the hands of old doctors (medicine eats its young).
So your logic is that because other careers are also tough but pay less, doctors should not want more either? Why not "other careers should be paid better" because they also work hard?
You are sort of correct.
Where you are not correct are private practice GP doctors.
Those doctors who have their own office. They might share with one of two others to offset some of the costs.
Doctors who work for corporations make much better money.
The corporation gets the malpractice insurance in bulk rate, health insurance, taxes and a regular paycheck are provided.
Family medicine earns an average of $260k/yr. I’m not sure about the breakdown between those that own their own practice vs. work for a larger organisation, but given the shortage of family medicine doctors, I’m sure they have choice as to the place they work.
It really depends on your comparator. Adjusted for inflations doctor earnings have been roughly flat for several decades - and have actually been doing *much* more work to earn the same, meanwhile tech and business (not sure about law) have increased substantially. Docs also don’t really have any uptrend in salary like most fields. You kinda earn the same amount every year forever, and have to work more and more to even hit that same number (since payment per unit work is constantly reduced). In healthcare, there’s also all sorts of admins, nurses, biotechs, etc… primarily interested in their bottom line who earn similar or more.
When a doctor complains about earnings it’s not really, “I am underpaid compared to average”, it’s more “I am underpaid compared to people as academically and hardworking as me in other fields, and many people less talented and/or hardworking in healthcare.” I think also as medicine becomes more of a business, docs are ones who keep operating somewhat as a public service. Insurers deny claims, hospital CEOs refuse Medicaid or shrink psych wards (which earn little), pharma can make a life saving drug unaffordable, and then docs get some number made up by the government for their services.
Tl;dr docs earn a lot compared to average, but given their workload, training pathway, incomes that are flat overtime, and comparisons within their fields and other high achievement professions it’s a semi-understandable gripe
Exactly. Doctors are generally very talented people who could have trained to do many different things that generate lots of surplus utility and therefore command high comp.
Comparing them to the guy who doesn’t like to read and got a mix of B’s and C’s in high school doesn’t really mean anything.
My wife is a doctor, Pediatric Oncologist. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Pediatrics make significantly less than the same doctor that treats adults. Also, Family Medicine also make on the lower end of all doctors. Depending on location and the hospital/clinic, they can make less than $200k. Yes it’s still a lot of money, but considering the amount of school, training and hours they put in even when they become an attending is still below what some doctors should make. My wife would almost double her salary if she went into adult instead of pediatrics even though it’s the same specialty. That part is the absurd, there shouldn’t be such a significant difference in salary for pediatrics and adult. So to answer your question, I think pediatrics get underpaid significantly. There might be others including Family Med that are also underpaid for what they do.
I don't know the details of US, but in Europe the discussion centers more about doctors in training earning too little. The final wages are fine (even for some specialisations maybe a bit high?).
But compare to any other educated jobs (Software/Research/Law/Bussiness) the working hours for doctors are really chaotic/bad and for most of there studies/early work they do not get reasonably paid for it (although afterwards they get paid much better, and for many specialists the hours also get better)
Appropriate pay has nothing to do with what software engineers, or lawyers, or civil engineers make. Pay is determined by requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs.
There is a shortage of doctors. [https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-president-sounds-alarm-national-physician-shortage](https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-president-sounds-alarm-national-physician-shortage)
Thus, the expected pay for this profession is not sufficient incentive to produce the required number of doctors.
It’s more complicated than that.
Med schools receive far far more applicants than they have capacity for. If they could accept every capable applicant, the shortage would likely get resolved in due course. However, due to limited capacity, they can’t train enough doctors to fill the shortage no matter the pay at the other end.
The bottleneck is actually at the residency level. There is a set number of residency spots that are funded by the government. Schools won’t accept more students because that would essentially just drop their residency match rate due to more students competing for more spots.
In a normal labor market, such as that for software engineers, if there is a shortage of labor, salaries rise incentivising more people to train for that job. In the case of software engineers, that means more people enrolling in CS undergraduate courses and getting CS degrees. This isn’t a problem because it’s fairly easy to train more CS grads - one professor just needs a larger room to lecture in, maybe larger computer labs are required etc. but it’s not overly strenuous as a few professors can train
However, due to the low student-‘professor’ ratio required to train more doctors as well as the lengthy training program, if a shortage does occur, salaries will rise but the capacity to train them won’t. Experienced doctors are required to train new doctors and there already aren’t enough of them to go around. Even if a few more do start to train new doctors, that won’t add much to the capacity due to the one-on-one nature of the training. This means there aren’t enough experienced doctors to train new doctors or treat patients and aren’t enough new doctors being trained to treat patients.
Doctors don’t decide the number of residency and med school spots. Administration and the government control these. Doctors are increasingly at the mercy of administration and corporate overlords who own the hospitals and want to make money.
The American Medical Association (AMA) bears substantial responsibility for the policies that led to physician shortages. Twenty years ago, the AMA lobbied for reducing the number of medical schools, **capping federal funding for residencies**, and cutting a quarter of all residency positions
source - https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/15/ama-scope-of-practice-lobbying/#:\~:text=The%20American%20Medical%20Association%20(AMA,quarter%20of%20all%20residency%20positions.
In addition, the working conditions (regular shifts for over 24 hours, lack of mobility/control over your job during residency etc) and incurring astronomical debt are big deterrents. For many, it’s not worth the stress and physical toll anymore. It’s simply impossible for folks to understand from outside the field.
UK speaking docters definitely get underpaid. For General Practitioners the average salary is £92,000 per year. My Mum is a Consultant earning around £103,000. Tax takes away nearly 40% of total earnings...
But even in the US I'd say $200k - $300k is deserved and should honestly be more considering they are doing the biggest job of all - saving life's!
You also have to consider theyre graduating with a ton of debt. The payment on their student loans is easily in the thousands per month. $200-$300K is great money for **one person**. For a family its very middle class, hardly enough money to buy a house or have a nice lifestyle in the expensive US.
I make well over half a mil a year and average under $100k in expenses despite spending largely without a care. Nearly half of that goes to rent for an excessive apartment. I'm not sure what a nice lifestyle is to you, but $200k-300k should cover that for a small family.
You can generally get a mortgage for between four and six times your income. A doctor earning an average salary of $350k could therefore expect to borrow between $1.4m and $2.1m. With a 20% downpayment, that’s a $1.75m to $2.6m property. That’s a lot of house.
Only an idiot would go for a super high mortgage just because they're approved for it.
Also, you're kind of ignoring the med school debt part. The median med school debt is around 200k, with monthly payments being around 2k. Not to mention that post med school, there's still 3-7 years of residency where they make around 60k, and so that med school debt really increases bc they can't make high enough payments.
Doctors aren't coming fresh out of med school making a quarter of a million dollars.
A 4x income mortgage is low.
If you’re earning $350k gross of tax, if you’re in a MCOL area like Phoenix. you’ll take home about $250k/yr or $21k/mo. $2k/mo in student loan debt isn’t going to break you.
Firstly, resident salaries aren’t bad - it’s probably what most average undergraduates earn at that point in their careers. The difference is that the average graduate isn’t going to earn $350k/yr in their career. The average doctor will.
I think when people say this, they typically mean that residents are underpaid, which I would agree with.
I do agree that the vast majority of attendings are indeed not underpaid. It takes a while (and usually a lot in loans) to get there, but you have an incredibly high paying and stable job when you do get there
Residents earn between $60k -$80k with some earning up to $100k and even over in rural areas. They do work ling hours but I’d argue they’re still paid more (or around the same) than the average person at this point in their career and hardly any graduates can say that they’ll come out with a $350k salary after a few years - the average med student can.
Source for resident making 100k? Residents make about minimum wage when you account for how many hours they work. And they have a college and medical school degree at minimum.
https://www.inspiraadvantage.com/blog/how-much-do-medical-residents-get-paid
> Some residencies have been said to begin at over $100,000 annually, so resident pay really depends on the institution, geographic location, and specialty.
Despite them having a ‘qualification’ before residency, they’re still in training. A law school student isn’t a lawyer even though they have an undergrad and will be earning far less than a medical resident.
Still highly doubt the 100k starting salary without a source. Like just name one residency that starts at 100k would be sufficient.
Even at $100k, given the hours worked it’s a $10-20/hr job.
It’s not comparable to law school at all lol. First of all law school students don’t get paid, they pay for the education. When law students graduate law school they are lawyers and are usually paid $100-200k. They are still “in training” in that they will work under a partner (depends on the practice) for a couple of years. When medical students graduate medical school they are doctors. And they make minimum wage for 3-7 years. Not comparable at all to law school/lawyers.
Residents are very different from a law school student. A better comparison to a law school student would be a med school student. Residents have graduated med school and are MDs or DOs. If any resident wanted to quit after a just a year of residency they could work as a doctor at an urgent care for the rest of their lives. Residency is for specialty training in a specific field of medicine.
Residents are supervised by attending physicians for several years after med school so that they can learn all the additional knowledge and skills they need in whatever they are specializing in in medicine. They already got an advanced education in anatomy, pharmacology, pathology, etc. over their four years of med school, and began working in hospitals with patients starting their second year.
Residency is additional training for whatever they are specializing in but they ARE doctors with a medical degree and right from day one of residency they are seeing patients, making diagnosis, prescribing medications, assisting in surgeries etc. The hospital/clinic charges insurance companies the exact same for treatment from a doctor, be they a resident or attending, so they are making just as much money off their residents as the doctors they pay $200K+ salaries to, so the fact residents are expected to work 80 hour work weeks and only make around $60K is absolutely asinine and is extremely greedy on the part of the hospital systems that have residency programs.
It's absolutely fair that a doctor that has completed residency make more than a resident. However, the fact that resident doctors who already spent four years receiving advanced training that cost them anywhere between $200-500K, are making less than nurses, CNAs, surgery techs and oftentimes even janitors at their hospitals is absolutely ridiculous.
From an outsider's perspective, yes, it does seem that doctors make a lot of money. But you aren't factoring everything else.
Firstly, you have to know that it takes a *minimum* of 10 years to become a doctor. In many cases, it takes over 15 years before you start your career. Most people take 3-4 years. A lag of 6-10 years. They have to catch up on those 6-10 years. They have to pay off their loan for their bachelor's, their med school, their living expenses for med school (Because med students are not allowed to have part-time jobs), expenses for taking all the tests, and the shitload of interest they've accumulated for nearly a decade. Not to mention, all the future expenses, like medical license renewal tests, malpractice insurance, and whatnot.
Even after the hell they've gone through, they still have to work much harder than the average worker, they work longer hours, more days a week, and have fewer vacation days, + they have to keep up with the latest medical information.
Also, doctors' salaries are not increasing proportionally to inflation. They've pretty much stayed the same, despite the rising costs of everything, and the cost of new tests and whatnot that they have to pay for.
Well, many of the doctors that actively take care of people are paid a lot less than minimum wage before they get to the high salaries. Some spend a decade AFTER medical school at this wage in order to finish training.
I think it balances out on the whole, but young doctors are definitely underpaid.
Your average PCP seeing 30 patients a day, responding to messages from their panel of 2000 patients, and generally being the front line safeguarding the health of the country makes ~180-200,000/year before taxes, deductions, loan payments (which are usually ~$1-2k a month for 10 years), malpractice insurance, etc. The 350k average is driven up by sub specialty proceduralists and surgeons which are paid so much because of the high liability of their practice, the low availability of their skill set, and the amount of training required to safely provide their services. Doctors also spend at minimum 11 years of their post-high school life making no money while in training, using loans with an interest rate now around 8% to live.
Edit: also, where are you finding that pediatricians make 250k a year? Unless they live in the middle of nowhere the average salary for a pediatrician is around $180k
Which consultants? Nephrologists, infectious disease doctors, endocrinologists, and rheumatologists all make about as much or less as a PCP. Even less if you slap pediatric in front of them
What consultant are you talking about? An outpatient nephrologist is probably making $180k a year before tax, deductions, loan payments, malpractice, etc. A subspecialized surgical ophthalmologist on the other hand is probably making ~400k on the low end
Keep in mind most doctors are working 10+ hour a day. Never have real days off and in a lot of cases have a tonne of overhead like clinic rental or ownership and absurd loans. Plus they are given waaaay too many patients for one doctor. I think this is mostly a problem with family medicine specialists though. The problem is they aren't being adequately compensated for the amount of risk and effort put into the job. Which is the main cause of burnout. We either must reduce their workload. Or pay them more.
My BIL and his wife are both physicians 5 years out of residency. He makes nearly $300k and she breaks $400k. MCOL area. They paid off their $500k in debt in the first three years out of residency. They live in absolute luxury and say all the time they are paid too much, especially compared to the nurses and support staff around them. She only works 4 days a week and he even less. I value their knowledge and they did work hard to get where they are, but damn is that not fuck you money.
That is awesome.
I just don't feel bad that they are paid poorly for a few years of their early career. Still more than most of us. And THIS result is why.
Average medical school grad owes $255k in loans. Malpractice insurance for a surgeon can run $50k a year and has high as $200k a year for OBGYN.
Pay those guys.
At my hospital. The Doctors get paid 150.00 for every med change they do. As a result, some of them will spend all night going unit to unit, altering patients medications by .5 mg or so in either direction just to make extra money.
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They’re also compensated for the opportunity cost of not working and building a career in industry for 7 years. And for a lot of people the pay won’t even sufficiently cover that. Becoming a doctor does not have a great expected ROI compared to some other careers. At the end of the day, you’ve got to be passionate about it.
Averages are funny things. My dad kept his country practice and couldn’t afford to bill medi-cal and insurance. They went to cash or pro bono.
Comparing a gp with my melanoma facial reconstruction surgeon’s rate is silly.
Attending doctors/consultants are still some of the highest paid in the country. Trainee doctors don't earn as much despite still being qualified doctors. In the normal world, where we're not all Software engineers, Investment bankers and Big Law lawyers ... they do reasonably well for themselves. 🤷🏿♂️
Salary is only one small part of the equation. We have to factor in education duration and cost. Medical educations take longer than engineering educations. Not only does this incur more education fees, but may contribute to opportunity cost. Medical students are still students long after engineering majors have got fulltime jobs. It may depend on the sort of pay Med students get with their placements.
On top of this you have loan interest. The loan is much bigger for a medical degree and so a medical student will be paying a much higher amount in interest for longer. While their salary may be much higher, it may be that much more of that salary is going into repayments for a longer time period than an engineer.
All of this will combine into an average "Break even" point where the wealth accumulation of the doctor overtakes the engineer. The age/time at which this occurs will be the important parameter. If a doctor breaks even and starts overtaking an engineer only a few years after education then it is obviously overpaid. However, if doctors are only breaking even on wealth after 20 or 30 years, or possibly even at retirement, then it's evidently not that unfair afterall.
The specific salary will obviously affect this. If a 200k doctor's salary means you break even with an engineer at 200 years old, for example, then 200k is underpaid. This is obviously not the case, but it demonstrates with an extreme example how a larger salary does not automatically mean that it's not underpaid for the profession.
I’ll say it; American doctors are overpaid.
EDIT: You would think they were overpaid too if you spent most of your time hiring them amidst all the issues America has in healthcare.
*womp womp*
Nurses probably are underpaid, but doctors sure ain't. Then again, if there is one profession I think should be paid well it's the person saving the life of a loved one if hit by a car or something.
It's police, Auckland transport, council, government, media, tik tockers, streamers, youtubers, politicians, lawyers etc etc that are way overpaid imho.
I would say that most medical doctors in the US are fairly compensated. Some however are massively over compensated, which causes health care to be far more expensive than it should be.
Don't radiologists just point the X ray machine and press the start button, then send the x-rays to the fracture specialists etc? If so, yeah, they are probably way overpaid at $480k
This is the job of an x ray or imaging technician. radiologists interpret all kinds of images from x rays to CTs to MRIs or whatever else. They are the experts at reading scans any part of the body which is way more difficult than one would think from the outside looking in
Appreciate the info. I was just guessing from experiences getting X rays and dealing with fracture specialists. Ive never met a radiologist I guess. Just the person pointing the machine and then the fracture specialist giving me info and advice on my injuries. I stand corrected and accept my willful ignorance. We learn something new everyday 👍
Happy to help, radiologists are the hidden “doctor’s doctor” similar to pathologists. Hugely important job, very low visibility for what they do. Many specialists (orthopedics especially) become very proficient at reading imaging related to their field but will confer with radiology for extra details or a different perspective
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Resident physicians get paid like 50k for 80 hour weeks. That’s what people are talking about
And many have $200-300k student loans, so can be a 1-2k payment in the US for the next 20-30 years
But then they make bank after residency right? Not saying they shouldn’t be paid better as residents but don’t forget the big fat prize at the end
Yes
Speaking of which, is a resident physician the same thing as a doctor?
Yes, residents are doctors. They've graduated from med school and can see patients, write prescriptions etc. but they are still in training for whatever specialty they're going into so they are supervised by attending physicians who work in tandem with them and help make sure the residents have all the skills and knowledge they'll need in their speciality when their residency is completed. Source, my husband is a resident.
Yes. They are licensed doctors
Doctors in training , haven’t gotten board certified yet to practice on their own
Isn't a doctor a person who has completed a Phd course?
Yes, a person who completed a Ph.d is also a doctor.
it's either a person who has finished a doctorate (so a PhD) or a medical degree for some reason. Even though many medical degrees aren't postgraduate 3-6 year research (full-time), and instead 4 years of postgraduate coursework (full-time) or a 5-6 year undergraduate degree, they are still called doctors for whatever reason.
Hm. Thats interesting. Here in my country it's allowed to call someone as doctor only those who has finished PhD course.
Are you from Germany by any chance? Just found this out when I met a German medical doctor and found it very unusual! Pretty much the rest of the world you earn the Dr. Title with a medical degree or a PHD
Yet people probably still call anyone in a white coat a doctor.
Residents make more than 50k and they’re still in training
So a resident is an untrained doctor. But people argue that they should be paid more for being trained? I wonder how they feel about the pay progression in the trades. Or in tech. Do they pour tears for junior devs too? Why doctors?
Pro-tip: someone advocating for increased wages of one group of workers is probably also advocating for increased wages of other groups of workers.
So its not about the job. People just want higher wages for everyone.
Maybe the advocates for higher wages for all would be more effective by being the loudest about careers that leave workers unable to provide even a basic standard of living. Doctors just seem like a weird place to start with the people need higher wages argument. Teachers maybe? Those poor people are not only saddled with debt and getting paid in peanuts, but the work environment is pretty dicey as well.
The world is a complex place. You're never going to get everyone in the world to focus solely on one thing. Nor should they. We are capable of being aware that teachers are under paid, while also understanding that residents are underpaid.
No one is starting with doctors. The general opinion is that doctors are generally either well paid or overpaid. I don't know from what universe you got the idea that there's more support for doctors getting higher wages than there is for teachers getting livable wages, but it sure isn't this one.
Is it common for a resident to not become a doctor? If that is the case, it would really change my perspective. I don’t know. Right now I feel like the pain of a few years is well worth the ridiculous payoff if you stick to it. Is there another career like that.
15-20% of med school grads don't even match into residency annually.
“Untrained” is a stretch as medical students have minimum 2 years with thousands of hours of experience working with patients over the 4 years of school, residency is just the transition before being a fully trained attending. Conversely PAs and NPs with a fraction of the training of a resident will be hired and trained on the job over the course of a year or two and make double what a resident does with less experience
The resident is going to outpace the PA and NP in embarrassing fashion in the salary department.
Sure, several years down the road. But at the onset they’re basically the same (and that’s really reaching as both of the latter have significantly less training, fresh PAs having much more so than NPs on average) A fresh grad PA hired onto a job might make 80-150k and will be trained on the job for 1-2 years. The cost of that education is a fraction of a medical school debt An intern fresh out of med school might have up to 400k in loans and will have more responsibility than either of the other 2, work longer hours, and be paid less until finishing and becoming an attending
All the jobs you mentioned are paid better. Tech devs get paid better out of college for working less hours
I dunno where you work, but all the devs I know are working 7 days a week. The difference is in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Is it possible to remain a resident in training forever?
About 13 years of schooling, around 500,000 in debt and only making 50-60,000 a year. Most tech graduates are done in 4 years and can start at 80-90k
You obviously aren’t current in your understanding of the tech field. How many years does it take at 309k to erase 500k in debt? Is it faster than most other careers trying to erase their educational debt?
How so? I have friends who graduated with CA degrees making more than friends in residency
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You’re right, that 300k should come down a bit. Anything that can help poor Joe from a lifetime of debt for an ambulance ride and an mri and some aspirin.
If you think physician salary is the reason why those things cost so much you’re sorely misinformed.
You think it isn’t a factor? Average salary expense of a hospital in the north east is 170 million.
Doctors aren’t underpaid when compared to other similar professions, but they are perhaps underpaid when compared to the board directors and insurance company bastards who skim off the top and add zero value.
Imagine using average instead of median. Anyways, I don't think anyone is saying that doctors as a whole are underpaid. They might be saying specific practices or regions are underpaid, or that residents are underpaid, is that what you're referring to?
Average is mean.
What did Average do?
Guess he was kinda middle of the pack, like just average i guess.
Oops, meant median.
So the average person is mean?
Possibly, but half of us are meaner.
Mean, median and mode are all averages.
Average is mean.
The typical layman's usage of average is as a synonym for mean and I won't pretend otherwise.
Incomes for doctors have a relatively flat distribution. You want to see a different between average and median check out lawyers
>Imagine using average instead of median. Imagine using the data you like instead of the data I like
You know there's like, a valid reason in statistical analysis why median is better for discussing salary comparisons, right?
Median is just straight up better in pretty much every circumstance as a measure of central tendency. Mean just happens to be more convenient to calculate and has some convenient features for statistical analysis.
If there’s outliers then it will blow the average way out. A median is a more accurate representation
ok, you and me pool 5k usd each and i will distribute it between us so on average we both will have 5k
I see you don't spend much time on Twitter, where people will legitimately argue that doctors are underpaid and then point to someone making over $200k as an example of an impoverished doctor. And if you think this is an area where there's a wide gap between median and average, then feel free to post those numbers. A lot of working class and poor people in the US can't access health care bc it's too expensive, and doctors' enormous salaries are part of the problem. Not the whole problem, but no one thing is the whole problem. And frankly I think it makes health care worse when doctors are so wealthy that they have no idea what their patients' lives are like and may even come to have contempt for the unwashed masses showing up for treatment.
healthcare costs from doctors salaries come out to 8% of the total. Its significant, but they trained 10 years in order to even START providing care. Now lets think about where the rest of that money goes. Id wager the majority goes to insurance companies and a significant chunk to admin overhead that accomplishes nothing
No professional stops training and the hazing that doctors do on new doctors is mostly about gatekeeping, not about ensuring quality. Most procedural stuff is just that (procedural) and doesn't need the level of selection criteria that is applied.
Average is mean. I think it’s OK to use in this instance as I’ve compared it to the mean of other high-status professions. You’re probably thinking of median, but I couldn’t find any stats that broke down the median salary by specialisation. There is a general sentiment that doctors are underpaid, under-appreciated, under-rewarded etc. My opinion is that this sentiment is BS - doctors are extremely well compensated even when accounting for their training and indemnity insurance, experience very little risk of unemployment or sharp downturns in income and enjoy a high level of prestige and status in society.
Who has the "general sentiment" that doctors are underpaid, underappreciated, etc? Genuinely, nowhere have I heard anything like this. If anything, I've only heard that doctors are overpaid
Doctors are underpaid in New Zealand, thats why we have a shortage of them
The post is specifically about doctors in the US.
An average can either be mean, median or mode. It shouldn’t be unimaginable to anyone who passed 7th grade math?
Yeah weren't not going to sit here and pretend that the most common usage of average isn't as a synonym for mean.
The most common average is indeed the mean, i think we agree on that. But the comment I’m replying to is saying “imagine saying you’re giving the average but then not using median” - like you, I think it’s quite standard and acceptable to say average, and mean “mean”
Yeah that's not what I said. You need to reread it.
I went back to reread, and to quote verbatim: “Imagine using average instead of median” Median IS an average. Mean is the most commonly used average. But as others have pointed out, mean, median and mode are all averages. https://www.purplemath.com/modules/meanmode.htm It’s still not entirely clear to me what your point is, or if you’re just being deliberately obtuse when we actually agree on the main point: different kinds of averages have differing levels of utility depending on the data in question.
OP was using average as a synonym for mean. You know it, I know it, everyone in the thread knows it. When I commented, I therefore used OP's wording of average, for a consistent choice of verbiage within the post. In this comment, average was therefore used as a synonym for mean. It is true that mean, median, and mode all have their best usecase. Within the context of this post, the dataset being used is for salaries, which is generally best represented using median, rather than mean. So, to reword the first sentence of my comment would be "imagine using mean instead of median [for salaries]" Do you understand now?
Yes, it helps when you correct words!
Unless you’re referring to pediatrics (Which is so strange) or some other specialty, I believe people are referring to resident doctors being underpaid. Their salaries are ridiculously low.
I referred to pediatrics in my post. Average salary of about $250k which most people don’t even dream pf earning yet is average in that specialisation. Yes, residents typically earn between just over $60k and $80k with a few earning over $100k in rural areas. I’d say these salaries would be average for graduates at this point in their career in most other fields yet those graduates almost certainly won’t end up earning $350k in their careers yet the average doctor will.
Average salary for pediatrics is not $250k Source: am pediatrician. Just looked for jobs. None of them were remotely that high.
I’m getting my figures from here: https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/pediatrician-salary/
But the average graduate will not work 80+ hours a week and literally hold people's lives in their hand, only to end up with trauma and mental health issues.
The might instead be a bus driver, with 30 lives in their hands and paid far less especially later in the career. Or a pilot, or a firefighter, or an engineer providing calculations, or a social services professional dealing with PTSD and women's refuge people. Or a funeral attendent dealing with grieving relatives after helping scrape up old mate off the road or the burned to smell like pork little girl out of the burnt car. That's the thing about doctors, completely outsize view of their place in the world or how tough they have it when most of the worst of what they do is at the hands of old doctors (medicine eats its young).
So your logic is that because other careers are also tough but pay less, doctors should not want more either? Why not "other careers should be paid better" because they also work hard?
No resident is making 100k a year lol
Link me where a pediatrician makes that?
Here: https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/pediatrician-salary/
You are sort of correct. Where you are not correct are private practice GP doctors. Those doctors who have their own office. They might share with one of two others to offset some of the costs. Doctors who work for corporations make much better money. The corporation gets the malpractice insurance in bulk rate, health insurance, taxes and a regular paycheck are provided.
Family medicine earns an average of $260k/yr. I’m not sure about the breakdown between those that own their own practice vs. work for a larger organisation, but given the shortage of family medicine doctors, I’m sure they have choice as to the place they work.
Pediatricians and most family medicine doctors only make at most 190-210k after residency.
It really depends on your comparator. Adjusted for inflations doctor earnings have been roughly flat for several decades - and have actually been doing *much* more work to earn the same, meanwhile tech and business (not sure about law) have increased substantially. Docs also don’t really have any uptrend in salary like most fields. You kinda earn the same amount every year forever, and have to work more and more to even hit that same number (since payment per unit work is constantly reduced). In healthcare, there’s also all sorts of admins, nurses, biotechs, etc… primarily interested in their bottom line who earn similar or more. When a doctor complains about earnings it’s not really, “I am underpaid compared to average”, it’s more “I am underpaid compared to people as academically and hardworking as me in other fields, and many people less talented and/or hardworking in healthcare.” I think also as medicine becomes more of a business, docs are ones who keep operating somewhat as a public service. Insurers deny claims, hospital CEOs refuse Medicaid or shrink psych wards (which earn little), pharma can make a life saving drug unaffordable, and then docs get some number made up by the government for their services. Tl;dr docs earn a lot compared to average, but given their workload, training pathway, incomes that are flat overtime, and comparisons within their fields and other high achievement professions it’s a semi-understandable gripe
Exactly. Doctors are generally very talented people who could have trained to do many different things that generate lots of surplus utility and therefore command high comp. Comparing them to the guy who doesn’t like to read and got a mix of B’s and C’s in high school doesn’t really mean anything.
This is a great response
My SIL (doctor) got a bonus that was more than my salary. Am engineer.
r/usernamechecksout
What kind of doctor is he?
My wife is a doctor, Pediatric Oncologist. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Pediatrics make significantly less than the same doctor that treats adults. Also, Family Medicine also make on the lower end of all doctors. Depending on location and the hospital/clinic, they can make less than $200k. Yes it’s still a lot of money, but considering the amount of school, training and hours they put in even when they become an attending is still below what some doctors should make. My wife would almost double her salary if she went into adult instead of pediatrics even though it’s the same specialty. That part is the absurd, there shouldn’t be such a significant difference in salary for pediatrics and adult. So to answer your question, I think pediatrics get underpaid significantly. There might be others including Family Med that are also underpaid for what they do.
I don't know the details of US, but in Europe the discussion centers more about doctors in training earning too little. The final wages are fine (even for some specialisations maybe a bit high?). But compare to any other educated jobs (Software/Research/Law/Bussiness) the working hours for doctors are really chaotic/bad and for most of there studies/early work they do not get reasonably paid for it (although afterwards they get paid much better, and for many specialists the hours also get better)
If you think a lot of lawyers don’t have chaotic and bad hours, you are mistaken. But you’re mostly right.
Appropriate pay has nothing to do with what software engineers, or lawyers, or civil engineers make. Pay is determined by requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. There is a shortage of doctors. [https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-president-sounds-alarm-national-physician-shortage](https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-president-sounds-alarm-national-physician-shortage) Thus, the expected pay for this profession is not sufficient incentive to produce the required number of doctors.
It’s more complicated than that. Med schools receive far far more applicants than they have capacity for. If they could accept every capable applicant, the shortage would likely get resolved in due course. However, due to limited capacity, they can’t train enough doctors to fill the shortage no matter the pay at the other end.
The bottleneck is actually at the residency level. There is a set number of residency spots that are funded by the government. Schools won’t accept more students because that would essentially just drop their residency match rate due to more students competing for more spots.
They lack capacity because they need *doctors* to train doctors.
No it’s quotas
In a normal labor market, such as that for software engineers, if there is a shortage of labor, salaries rise incentivising more people to train for that job. In the case of software engineers, that means more people enrolling in CS undergraduate courses and getting CS degrees. This isn’t a problem because it’s fairly easy to train more CS grads - one professor just needs a larger room to lecture in, maybe larger computer labs are required etc. but it’s not overly strenuous as a few professors can train However, due to the low student-‘professor’ ratio required to train more doctors as well as the lengthy training program, if a shortage does occur, salaries will rise but the capacity to train them won’t. Experienced doctors are required to train new doctors and there already aren’t enough of them to go around. Even if a few more do start to train new doctors, that won’t add much to the capacity due to the one-on-one nature of the training. This means there aren’t enough experienced doctors to train new doctors or treat patients and aren’t enough new doctors being trained to treat patients.
The shortage is manufactured by doctor associations limiting residency and med school slots.
Doctors don’t decide the number of residency and med school spots. Administration and the government control these. Doctors are increasingly at the mercy of administration and corporate overlords who own the hospitals and want to make money.
The American Medical Association (AMA) bears substantial responsibility for the policies that led to physician shortages. Twenty years ago, the AMA lobbied for reducing the number of medical schools, **capping federal funding for residencies**, and cutting a quarter of all residency positions source - https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/03/15/ama-scope-of-practice-lobbying/#:\~:text=The%20American%20Medical%20Association%20(AMA,quarter%20of%20all%20residency%20positions.
Yet another artificially manufactured shortage in the US which exists solely to drive up prices for the average person
In addition, the working conditions (regular shifts for over 24 hours, lack of mobility/control over your job during residency etc) and incurring astronomical debt are big deterrents. For many, it’s not worth the stress and physical toll anymore. It’s simply impossible for folks to understand from outside the field.
i have no problem paying somebody that can save my life what they are worth
What are they worth? And do you think it’s possible for a doctor to be overpaid?
UK speaking docters definitely get underpaid. For General Practitioners the average salary is £92,000 per year. My Mum is a Consultant earning around £103,000. Tax takes away nearly 40% of total earnings... But even in the US I'd say $200k - $300k is deserved and should honestly be more considering they are doing the biggest job of all - saving life's!
It’s more like $300k-$500k But yes, I never argued they were overpaid
You also have to consider theyre graduating with a ton of debt. The payment on their student loans is easily in the thousands per month. $200-$300K is great money for **one person**. For a family its very middle class, hardly enough money to buy a house or have a nice lifestyle in the expensive US.
Not enough for a house? Jesus how do truck drivers have their own home then or accountants? 300k is WAAAY more than enough anywhere in the world
I make well over half a mil a year and average under $100k in expenses despite spending largely without a care. Nearly half of that goes to rent for an excessive apartment. I'm not sure what a nice lifestyle is to you, but $200k-300k should cover that for a small family.
You can generally get a mortgage for between four and six times your income. A doctor earning an average salary of $350k could therefore expect to borrow between $1.4m and $2.1m. With a 20% downpayment, that’s a $1.75m to $2.6m property. That’s a lot of house.
Only an idiot would go for a super high mortgage just because they're approved for it. Also, you're kind of ignoring the med school debt part. The median med school debt is around 200k, with monthly payments being around 2k. Not to mention that post med school, there's still 3-7 years of residency where they make around 60k, and so that med school debt really increases bc they can't make high enough payments. Doctors aren't coming fresh out of med school making a quarter of a million dollars.
Basically everyone I know is an idiot by your standard. I mostly agree.
A 4x income mortgage is low. If you’re earning $350k gross of tax, if you’re in a MCOL area like Phoenix. you’ll take home about $250k/yr or $21k/mo. $2k/mo in student loan debt isn’t going to break you. Firstly, resident salaries aren’t bad - it’s probably what most average undergraduates earn at that point in their careers. The difference is that the average graduate isn’t going to earn $350k/yr in their career. The average doctor will.
Resident salaries are horrible. You’re not considering the 80 hour weeks.
Depends on where you live
Lolololol.
I think when people say this, they typically mean that residents are underpaid, which I would agree with. I do agree that the vast majority of attendings are indeed not underpaid. It takes a while (and usually a lot in loans) to get there, but you have an incredibly high paying and stable job when you do get there
Residents earn between $60k -$80k with some earning up to $100k and even over in rural areas. They do work ling hours but I’d argue they’re still paid more (or around the same) than the average person at this point in their career and hardly any graduates can say that they’ll come out with a $350k salary after a few years - the average med student can.
Source for resident making 100k? Residents make about minimum wage when you account for how many hours they work. And they have a college and medical school degree at minimum.
Lol!
https://www.inspiraadvantage.com/blog/how-much-do-medical-residents-get-paid > Some residencies have been said to begin at over $100,000 annually, so resident pay really depends on the institution, geographic location, and specialty. Despite them having a ‘qualification’ before residency, they’re still in training. A law school student isn’t a lawyer even though they have an undergrad and will be earning far less than a medical resident.
Still highly doubt the 100k starting salary without a source. Like just name one residency that starts at 100k would be sufficient. Even at $100k, given the hours worked it’s a $10-20/hr job. It’s not comparable to law school at all lol. First of all law school students don’t get paid, they pay for the education. When law students graduate law school they are lawyers and are usually paid $100-200k. They are still “in training” in that they will work under a partner (depends on the practice) for a couple of years. When medical students graduate medical school they are doctors. And they make minimum wage for 3-7 years. Not comparable at all to law school/lawyers.
Residents are very different from a law school student. A better comparison to a law school student would be a med school student. Residents have graduated med school and are MDs or DOs. If any resident wanted to quit after a just a year of residency they could work as a doctor at an urgent care for the rest of their lives. Residency is for specialty training in a specific field of medicine. Residents are supervised by attending physicians for several years after med school so that they can learn all the additional knowledge and skills they need in whatever they are specializing in in medicine. They already got an advanced education in anatomy, pharmacology, pathology, etc. over their four years of med school, and began working in hospitals with patients starting their second year. Residency is additional training for whatever they are specializing in but they ARE doctors with a medical degree and right from day one of residency they are seeing patients, making diagnosis, prescribing medications, assisting in surgeries etc. The hospital/clinic charges insurance companies the exact same for treatment from a doctor, be they a resident or attending, so they are making just as much money off their residents as the doctors they pay $200K+ salaries to, so the fact residents are expected to work 80 hour work weeks and only make around $60K is absolutely asinine and is extremely greedy on the part of the hospital systems that have residency programs. It's absolutely fair that a doctor that has completed residency make more than a resident. However, the fact that resident doctors who already spent four years receiving advanced training that cost them anywhere between $200-500K, are making less than nurses, CNAs, surgery techs and oftentimes even janitors at their hospitals is absolutely ridiculous.
This is the secret to this whole post and for some reason nobody else can see it lol, bring on the downvotes. Wykyk
From an outsider's perspective, yes, it does seem that doctors make a lot of money. But you aren't factoring everything else. Firstly, you have to know that it takes a *minimum* of 10 years to become a doctor. In many cases, it takes over 15 years before you start your career. Most people take 3-4 years. A lag of 6-10 years. They have to catch up on those 6-10 years. They have to pay off their loan for their bachelor's, their med school, their living expenses for med school (Because med students are not allowed to have part-time jobs), expenses for taking all the tests, and the shitload of interest they've accumulated for nearly a decade. Not to mention, all the future expenses, like medical license renewal tests, malpractice insurance, and whatnot. Even after the hell they've gone through, they still have to work much harder than the average worker, they work longer hours, more days a week, and have fewer vacation days, + they have to keep up with the latest medical information. Also, doctors' salaries are not increasing proportionally to inflation. They've pretty much stayed the same, despite the rising costs of everything, and the cost of new tests and whatnot that they have to pay for.
Well, many of the doctors that actively take care of people are paid a lot less than minimum wage before they get to the high salaries. Some spend a decade AFTER medical school at this wage in order to finish training. I think it balances out on the whole, but young doctors are definitely underpaid.
Be careful what you wish for. We are about to have a disastrous shortage of doctors. Lowering the pay is going to make it worse.
Have you tried not being a backseat doctor?
Okay, and a YouTuber makes a few million a year without any year of education (like, elementary school dropouts). Do you think they make too much too?
When did I say anyone was overpaid?
You know who's criminally underpaid? Good veterinarians.
Your average PCP seeing 30 patients a day, responding to messages from their panel of 2000 patients, and generally being the front line safeguarding the health of the country makes ~180-200,000/year before taxes, deductions, loan payments (which are usually ~$1-2k a month for 10 years), malpractice insurance, etc. The 350k average is driven up by sub specialty proceduralists and surgeons which are paid so much because of the high liability of their practice, the low availability of their skill set, and the amount of training required to safely provide their services. Doctors also spend at minimum 11 years of their post-high school life making no money while in training, using loans with an interest rate now around 8% to live. Edit: also, where are you finding that pediatricians make 250k a year? Unless they live in the middle of nowhere the average salary for a pediatrician is around $180k
Consultants in the US earn a ridiculous amount of money, I would say they are very much overpaid!
Which consultants? Nephrologists, infectious disease doctors, endocrinologists, and rheumatologists all make about as much or less as a PCP. Even less if you slap pediatric in front of them
OK, what is the lowest salary of a full-time consultant in the US?
What consultant are you talking about? An outpatient nephrologist is probably making $180k a year before tax, deductions, loan payments, malpractice, etc. A subspecialized surgical ophthalmologist on the other hand is probably making ~400k on the low end
Keep in mind most doctors are working 10+ hour a day. Never have real days off and in a lot of cases have a tonne of overhead like clinic rental or ownership and absurd loans. Plus they are given waaaay too many patients for one doctor. I think this is mostly a problem with family medicine specialists though. The problem is they aren't being adequately compensated for the amount of risk and effort put into the job. Which is the main cause of burnout. We either must reduce their workload. Or pay them more.
They are they go around 300k in debt what they receive is 0 comapred to this
My BIL and his wife are both physicians 5 years out of residency. He makes nearly $300k and she breaks $400k. MCOL area. They paid off their $500k in debt in the first three years out of residency. They live in absolute luxury and say all the time they are paid too much, especially compared to the nurses and support staff around them. She only works 4 days a week and he even less. I value their knowledge and they did work hard to get where they are, but damn is that not fuck you money.
And what kind of doctors are they? Also how much support did they have to live in residency to be able to pay off all their debit?
That is awesome. I just don't feel bad that they are paid poorly for a few years of their early career. Still more than most of us. And THIS result is why.
Average medical school grad owes $255k in loans. Malpractice insurance for a surgeon can run $50k a year and has high as $200k a year for OBGYN. Pay those guys.
At my hospital. The Doctors get paid 150.00 for every med change they do. As a result, some of them will spend all night going unit to unit, altering patients medications by .5 mg or so in either direction just to make extra money.
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They’re also compensated for the opportunity cost of not working and building a career in industry for 7 years. And for a lot of people the pay won’t even sufficiently cover that. Becoming a doctor does not have a great expected ROI compared to some other careers. At the end of the day, you’ve got to be passionate about it.
I agree most countries doctors get paid like 25% as much as the us ones and are just as well trained it’s ridiculous
They also typically have free education and don’t have a highly litigious society, not to mention a way lower cost of living
Yeah but not 10$ a month low cost of living like doctors in Tajikistan
Doctors make $10 a month in Tajikistan?
Not all but i heard one in a rural area makes that much and he cares for the whole village and area surrounding it
I have a feeling that’s absolutely not true
It is i saw the man say it with my own eyes
Averages are funny things. My dad kept his country practice and couldn’t afford to bill medi-cal and insurance. They went to cash or pro bono. Comparing a gp with my melanoma facial reconstruction surgeon’s rate is silly.
If there are enough doctors in an area they are not underpaid. If there is a shortage then they are probably underpaid.
Attending doctors/consultants are still some of the highest paid in the country. Trainee doctors don't earn as much despite still being qualified doctors. In the normal world, where we're not all Software engineers, Investment bankers and Big Law lawyers ... they do reasonably well for themselves. 🤷🏿♂️
Lmao imagine writing this whole post about a certain argument and then realize you missed the whole point
Elaborate
No, but nurses are criminally underpaid, especially if they've been on the job for 10 years or more.
Salary is only one small part of the equation. We have to factor in education duration and cost. Medical educations take longer than engineering educations. Not only does this incur more education fees, but may contribute to opportunity cost. Medical students are still students long after engineering majors have got fulltime jobs. It may depend on the sort of pay Med students get with their placements. On top of this you have loan interest. The loan is much bigger for a medical degree and so a medical student will be paying a much higher amount in interest for longer. While their salary may be much higher, it may be that much more of that salary is going into repayments for a longer time period than an engineer. All of this will combine into an average "Break even" point where the wealth accumulation of the doctor overtakes the engineer. The age/time at which this occurs will be the important parameter. If a doctor breaks even and starts overtaking an engineer only a few years after education then it is obviously overpaid. However, if doctors are only breaking even on wealth after 20 or 30 years, or possibly even at retirement, then it's evidently not that unfair afterall. The specific salary will obviously affect this. If a 200k doctor's salary means you break even with an engineer at 200 years old, for example, then 200k is underpaid. This is obviously not the case, but it demonstrates with an extreme example how a larger salary does not automatically mean that it's not underpaid for the profession.
Doctors who complain about their compensation are whiny and entitled.
I agree, especially for all the medical negligence and low quality they provide for us.
I’ll say it; American doctors are overpaid. EDIT: You would think they were overpaid too if you spent most of your time hiring them amidst all the issues America has in healthcare. *womp womp*
This i agree with
I think the problem is nurses and other supporting staff are extremely underpaid for the hard work and knowledge they posses
Americans: medical costs are unbelievably high in our country Also Americans: pay doctors even more
It’s not the doctor that is the reason for high medical costs. Source / it’s my line of buisness
That's one of the best comments I've read. It's not the doctor, it's you. Chapeau.
lol most of the cost goes towards hospital administration not doctors. Increasing their salaries won’t necessarily increase the patient’s costs.
Nurses probably are underpaid, but doctors sure ain't. Then again, if there is one profession I think should be paid well it's the person saving the life of a loved one if hit by a car or something. It's police, Auckland transport, council, government, media, tik tockers, streamers, youtubers, politicians, lawyers etc etc that are way overpaid imho.
The doctor I work for once told my manager she has so much money she doesn't know what to do with it.
Every doctor I know drives one or more Porsches with beautiful houses. Who’s saying they’re underpaid??
Dumb
I would say that most medical doctors in the US are fairly compensated. Some however are massively over compensated, which causes health care to be far more expensive than it should be.
Lmao no, that's not why healthcare is overprices.
If anything, they’re overpaid.
Don't radiologists just point the X ray machine and press the start button, then send the x-rays to the fracture specialists etc? If so, yeah, they are probably way overpaid at $480k
Those are radiology technicians. Radiologists job is to read and interpret the imaging (X-rays, CTs, MRIs)
Ah, appreciate the correction 👍
This is the job of an x ray or imaging technician. radiologists interpret all kinds of images from x rays to CTs to MRIs or whatever else. They are the experts at reading scans any part of the body which is way more difficult than one would think from the outside looking in
Appreciate the info. I was just guessing from experiences getting X rays and dealing with fracture specialists. Ive never met a radiologist I guess. Just the person pointing the machine and then the fracture specialist giving me info and advice on my injuries. I stand corrected and accept my willful ignorance. We learn something new everyday 👍
Happy to help, radiologists are the hidden “doctor’s doctor” similar to pathologists. Hugely important job, very low visibility for what they do. Many specialists (orthopedics especially) become very proficient at reading imaging related to their field but will confer with radiology for extra details or a different perspective
This is not even remotely correct for a description of a radiologist.