1. Doctors spend 40,000 hours on education
2. Loans after college and med school can reach $300,527 and take 20 years to pay off
3. The two combined deprives doctors of $788,880 in net income
4. Other countries don't have these high education costs
5. The average doctor works about 60 hours a week
6. Doctors income only makes up 10% of all healthcare costs
The risk of cutting into doctors' salaries means demotivating our best college students and driving them into other fields (Wall Street?).
I am a family doc. I make more than the average American. I spent a lot of my youth to get here and paid off a lot of debt along the way. The truth is that NOT everyone can be a doctor. I feel proud of what I have accomplished and how much I directly help people. I do not feel bad for making a very good living. It is still the American dream, you know.
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Why are we apologizing for any of this?
"I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything – except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only ‘to serve.’ That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards – never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind – yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of a man who resents it – and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t."
- neurosurgeon Dr. Hendricks in "Atlas Shrugged"
There was an unwritten agreement: You give up your 20s and early 30s (think of your hours in class and studying, and residency hours even now with the "limit" of 80 hours per week, vis-a-vis your friends not going into medicine) and society will compensate you for it.
Well, absent that agreement, and with most physicians now employees, the physician work week will decrease and those going into medicine will have a different mindset. Witness the increase in applications to Dermatology residency and radiology (I can read films from my computer while still in my bathrobe), and destruction of primary care.
This may or may not be progress. But I think, "not."
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