Comment by bigmadshoe
20 hours ago
Why do doctors need to be paid integer multiples more in the US than every other country on earth? This is not rhetorical, I mean it sincerely.
And I’m aware that medical debt is a big issue, but it seems like a chicken-or-the-egg type problem. Of course you can charge $500k for a medical degree when the doctor can make it back and then some in 5-10 years.
Nurses are also highly-paid in the USA (relative to other developed countries), and they make up a large part of the wage expenditure in the system. This may not make a difference to your point, but it is important to note that doctors are not the whole problem.
because in the us everything is integer multiple times more expensive
No, that's not why. Doctors also make drastically more than the median wage. Doctors make so much in the US because we have artificial scarcity of doctors.
i mean sure, but all skilled labor is trending towards 200-300K wages in the us.
if a "senior" software engineer can make half a mil, and an electrician can make 200k, of course doctor pay are high.
who is going to take 10-15 years of school and debt otherwise?
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They don't! It's a huge problem! It's probably the problem in US health care, which, despite my own belief that single-payer is bad policy, is in fact a total shitshow.
I think there's also the gamified confusion of over how much goes to the physician versus how much goes to administrating orgs and liability coverage.
We have numbers for this, we don't need to derive them axiomatically. Practitioner compensation is the largest component of health provider spending. Liability coverage is the second largest component of admin spending, which is 25% of provider spending.
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