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.
Let’s not pretend that me paying $500 two weeks ago for a CT scan which showed a small lesion in my pancreas, then $600 this week for an MRI which was inconclusive due to motion artifacts, with another $500 CT scan recommended in 6 months, all while I pay $550 per month for corporate insurance that then tells me I must pay a minimum of $7000 out of pocket (my $1200 deductible doesn’t apply to these procedures for some strange reason)(equivalent to about 1/6 to 1/7 of my annual wages) before they will pay their share, which also resets annually, while still being expected to pay around $1100 a month for housing, $300 every two weeks for groceries and $650 a month for car note, $240 for car insurance, and all this after I also put taxes that apparently are only useful for either bombing other nations, sending bombs to other nations, or purchasing ammunition for shooting black and brown people when they sneeze wrong (I do support Ukraine’s defensive War and retaking their stolen land) is in any way preferable.
Do not pretend that the American system is in any way feasible or preferable. It’s simply designed to funnel money from us poors to the wealthy.
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.