The Debate Over Physician Salaries Continues

And Dr. Rob Oliver knocks it out of the park…

Tuition and living expenses during college ~ $150,000
Tuition and living expenses during medical school ~ $85,000
Average wage during my intern year in 1998 ~ $5.80 /hour
Average wage my 8th year in surgical training in 2005 ~ $9.75 /hour
Spending ages 22-35 in the library or hospital ~ PRICELE$$

(hat tip: plasticized)

Comments

Anonymous
Where are these people going to college that it costs them $150K for 4 years?
Anonymous
My college will be similar only reversed.
Undergraduate (State College): 60,000 w/ room and board.
Medical School (Private): 220,000
Tuition: 40,000+/yr
Room/Board/Fees/etc.:15,000/yr
Anonymous
I can personally attest that it cost me $120,000 to put my kid through four years at NYU.
And a lot of parents got waiters, cashiers, and waterbed salesman for their effort.
Anonymous
If you plan to go into medicine, why choose a private school? Will a state school degree with a high GPA not get you into medical school?
Anonymous
Out of the park? More like three strikes and he is out. Yet again we see the old fallacy of X dollars for cost of training magically equates to Y dollars for after-expense compensation. Complete nonsense. BTW, if you don’t like resident compensation rates then change the system. Agitate for a provider tax and take the money and put it towards increasing resident salaries.
Anonymous
>>”Where are these people going to college that it costs them $150K for 4 years?”
Where? Everywhere.
Go to Georgetown, or Hopkins, or any of the Ivies, or USC, or Stanford, or Vanderbilt or Tulane, go to any of the small college ivy-equivalents like Middlebury, Bennington, Amherst or Bowdoin, and you can easily drop $150K. That kind of cost is commonplace. For those with their heads in the sand, college educations have easily outpaced inflation for years now. When I finished college, a modest starting job paid about twice the total annual cost of a private university. Now that same kind of job won’t even cover the cost of that final year of college.
I am amazed that the four-year medical education is quoted (albeit humorously) at only $85,000. These days, a bargain state university affiliated medical school, of which there are very few remaining, might cost that amount. The rest cost a lot more. Four years of medical school at a typical state university? Figure about $120K; at a private university, twice that.
Anonymous
So in other words, people are CHOOSING to go to expensive private schools for undergrad and med school. So why should we feel bad for them because of the debt load they have? That’s a choice they made. It’s not like the cost was hidden. If it didn’t translate into additional dollars, whose fault is that?
Physicians have a hard time taking responsibility for their own actions, which is ironic given that they accuse others of that same failing so often.
john
The point is that physician salaries make up 10% of US health care cost, so Medicare/Medicaid or other insurance cuts to physicians barely scratch the surface of fixing the huge and rising cost. The problems are the great drugs that keep you alive and the CT/MRI/labs that help diagnose your sickness. That technology costs a lot of money.
If you’d rather have a witch doctor diagnose your bloody stools it would be cheaper, but somewhat less effective.
Anonymous
there are probably a good nmber of witch doctores in this country who ALSO dropped in excess of $120k fro undergrad schooling.
The difference is they’ll likely make back their investment more quickly as they’re not burdened by much overhead, malpractice, government regulations etc.
ER doctor
This only happens because doctors have allowed it to happen, as a group. If doctors (when doctors) decide *enough* things will change…and not a moment sooner.
Mike
I think the point lost in all of this is that nonphysicians ought to have some repsect for what we are subjected to so we can treat their diseases. You just get all the negative energy on this site. “The do-no-harmers” “Ah, you asked for it” “Near dieties”
The list of expenses and time costs applies to no other field BUT medicine! So save the insults. We really do work pretty hard to get the degree.
But I guess its more fashionable to just berate us for not becoming NP’s, PA’s, or some cheaper, less educated field where it would have made more economic sense.
It really is a catch 22.
Anonymous
If you worked so hard to get that degree then why not use it. Yes, MRIs are expensive and so are CTs and many other tests. But, you don’t bat an eye over ordering them when all that great education tells you there really isn’t a need for them. You also do not order them for your patients own good, so spare us that song and dance. you instead, order them for your own good, and you couldn’t care less about the cost of them.
Anonymous
“You also do not order them for your patients own good, so spare us that song and dance. you instead, order them for your own good, and you couldn’t care less about the cost of them.”
The foul odor from your post permeates the web. Please tell mommy it is time for a diaper change.
Dr. Rob Oliver
Thank you for the notice, Kevin!
That little “itemization” was just to give some kind of context to people expenses of my education. I didn’t do it to claim poverty, but just to explain what we do give up.
I think I was actually too generous with my estimated hourly wage. I can remember sitting down once during residency and figuring out I was well below minimum wage at the time. This was all just pre “80 hour” work rules, and a lot of my surgery residency was 100-120 hours a week in the hospital with frequent every other night in house call. I can barely remember several years of my life in retrospect.

The Debate Over Physician Salaries Continues

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