Doctors make too much money

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:An orthopedic surgeon makes like 500K if s/he doesn't own a practice. They also take on like 600K in educational debt unless their parents are wealthy.

+ the years spent in education to become an orthopedic surgeon. In other countries, students get into medical school after 12th grade. They either go to college for undergrad or to medical school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:An orthopedic surgeon makes like 500K if s/he doesn't own a practice. They also take on like 600K in educational debt unless their parents are wealthy.

+ the years spent in education to become an orthopedic surgeon. In other countries, students get into medical school after 12th grade. They either go to college for undergrad or to medical school.

But their med school is longer to make up for it. It ends up being a couple years faster. Perhaps just one if you're in the US and can bring in a lot of college credits your freshman year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:Doc here. I left clinical medicine because the salary was rather low given my options. If I have to miss out on my kids life and my own life, I also have to maximize hourly compensation. Now I make more money doing something else. The expense of healthcare is not because of the doctors.

Except yes, it is. The fact you could make more money elsewhere doesn’t disprove that. The relative compensation of doctors and nurses and NPs and PAs in other first world countries is how we know that’s a major factor.

A few differences are that, in much of the world, doctors are able to go directly to medical school rather than to college first, adding substantial additional costs and 4 additional years not in the workforce. Then they are quite underpaid through residencies, which can last for a few-to-many years. So they are able to start practicing later and more substantially in debt (this especially layering on the comparative cost of college/med school in the US). Then, depending on their type of practice, they or they employer need to pay comparatively astronomical insurance premiums. All to say that there are several factors are play that are quite different from those in other developed countries, and that's not even getting into both the pros and cons of government healthcare providing systems. At least of my close friends who went into medicine, they are uniformly among the most dedicated, hard-working and smartest people I know. And when I compare their compensation to, say, my lawyer (I'm a lawyer), tech, finance friends, they are way, way underpaid. That said, there are of course some professions that are worse in terms of pay (notably teaching especially through high school), but at least teaching has pretty low formals barriers to entry (both in terms of comparative length, rigor and cost of requirements).

Every time I see a multi million dollar malpractice lawsuit in the news, or hear people casually throwing out the idea of suing a doctor for making a mistake, I think to myself, that’s why your health care costs so much. The practices are paying thousands and thousands and thousands a month in malpractice insurance because, ‘Murica! (I mean it’s one of the reasons health care costs so much in the US, not the only reason)

I understand some cases settle out of expediency, but they have to have a leg to stand on to get that far. Which means somebody was injured and somebody screwed up.
My overall reaction to the lawsuit issue is "maybe do less malpractice."

I remember when I was in law school (back in the late 1990s), my health law professor said that the percentage of injured patients who sue is like 12%. And now, I am among them. I've had 3 surgeries to repair the injuries I sustained during childbirth, and I'm still not "normal". But potentially facing years of litigation while having to talk about these extremely personal issues publicly led me to not sue.

[Anonymous]

Honestly, I have no complaints about my doctors and that includes their salaries. They work their a$$es off and have provided me and my family with great care.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, I have no complaints about my doctors and that includes their salaries. They work their a$$es off and have provided me and my family with great care.

Your cleaning lady works her ass off, too. Are you willing to pay her $600k a year?

It's amazing how generous people are when they're able to get someone else to pay for 80-90% of a service.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, I have no complaints about my doctors and that includes their salaries. They work their a$$es off and have provided me and my family with great care.

+1 I actually think most doctors are massively underpaid compared to other professions when factoring in skill level, value of service they are providing, years/cost of education, work/life balance, etc

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, I have no complaints about my doctors and that includes their salaries. They work their a$$es off and have provided me and my family with great care.

+1 I actually think most doctors are massively underpaid compared to other professions when factoring in skill level, value of service they are providing, years/cost of education, work/life balance, etc

PCPs are underpaid. Radiologists, orthopedic surgeons, and anesthesiologists are ridiculously overpaid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, I have no complaints about my doctors and that includes their salaries. They work their a$$es off and have provided me and my family with great care.

Your cleaning lady works her ass off, too. Are you willing to pay her $600k a year?

It's amazing how generous people are when they're able to get someone else to pay for 80-90% of a service.

How many people are capable of performing a life saving surgery versus the number capable of scrubbing a toilet and how willing are you to accept the consequences if you forgo each service or if they screw it up?

Surely that factors into what people are willing to pay, regardless of what insurance is willing to kick in.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They’re paid 500k a year or so and they spend much of their time performing incredibly complex surgeries. If you want to start paying doctors like preschool teachers then you’re going to end up with doctors who have the equivalent IQ and training as a preschool teacher putting rods in your spine.

this. I am an ortho surgical nurse so I spend my entire day in surgery with the ortho spine and neurosurgeons. My sister is a early ed teacher. I love her but .... you really do not want "her" to attempt to repair your herniated discs or do a fusion of your L4-L5. Trust me on this

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, I have no complaints about my doctors and that includes their salaries. They work their a$$es off and have provided me and my family with great care.

Your cleaning lady works her ass off, too. Are you willing to pay her $600k a year?

It's amazing how generous people are when they're able to get someone else to pay for 80-90% of a service.

You lost all credibility by comparing cleaning lady with a doctor. Either purposely obtuse or simply stupid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, I have no complaints about my doctors and that includes their salaries. They work their a$$es off and have provided me and my family with great care.

Your cleaning lady works her ass off, too. Are you willing to pay her $600k a year?

It's amazing how generous people are when they're able to get someone else to pay for 80-90% of a service.

How many people are capable of performing a life saving surgery versus the number capable of scrubbing a toilet and how willing are you to accept the consequences if you forgo each service or if they screw it up?

Surely that factors into what people are willing to pay, regardless of what insurance is willing to kick in.

OK, do you pay for cleaning lady even 1/10th of that for working her "ass off"?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They’re paid 500k a year or so and they spend much of their time performing incredibly complex surgeries. If you want to start paying doctors like preschool teachers then you’re going to end up with doctors who have the equivalent IQ and training as a preschool teacher putting rods in your spine.

this. I am an ortho surgical nurse so I spend my entire day in surgery with the ortho spine and neurosurgeons. My sister is an early ed teacher. I love her but .... you really do not want "her" to attempt to repair your herniated discs or do a fusion of your L4-L5. Trust me on this

You don't think there's any room between $35k and $500k?

[Anonymous]

Why OP are not made at Wall Street and big law parteners who make millions?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why OP are not mad at Wall Street and big law parteners who make millions?

*mad

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why OP are not made at Wall Street and big law parteners who make millions?

Plenty of people think that is wrong, too.