Comment by chriskanan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chriskanan | Hacker News Reader

I feel like doctors should at least be paid as well as programmers. My wife is a physician with $500k in debt and she completes residency next summer. That took 4 years of undergrad, 1 year to burnish her credentials, 4 years of medical school, and 6 years of residency. Her job offers are all under $200k for pediatric neurology. With that enormous amount of training, debt, and responsibility, I feel like she should be making a lot more than your average AI programmer.

In other countries the education process is much shorter. For example, in Columbia, I'm told, you skip undergrad altogether to be a physician. Some other nations make training free, which encourages more general practitioners.

Can anyone explain why Medicare subsidizes residency slots? Moreover, why do they need to be subsidized? Residents earn about $40-60k per year and work 80 hour weeks.... If you think PhD students are slave labor, talk to residents.

I don't understand the reasoning that because one opts for expensive training that incurs debt then a high salary is necessary. What other forms of debt behave that way, where the more you take on the more compensated you should be?

I did a physics PhD, which took roughly 8 years of graduate training. My stipend was ~$12k per year for 80 hour weeks, and from that I still had to pay student fees. It's possible to graduate debt free in that situation (I did not), but does that imply that my working salary should be less? Or, because I did take on debt, I should get paid more?

Comment to me reads as a rant with a mix of false claims and requests for someone else to do the leg work.

For example, the average salary for a Pediatric Neurologist [1] within the US is higher than the average programmer salary [2].

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/pediatric-neurologist-sal...

[2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/programmer-salary-SRCH_KO...

In Sweden, there's no undergrad degree required for med school, but med school is 5.5 years (followed by 18 months of the Swedish equivalent of residency). Like in the US, most physicians are specialists which requires around 5 more years of training. Their student debt will generally be around 350k SEK once they finish med school which is around 40k USD, but they're paid peanuts compared to physicians in the US (~50k-80k USD per year). That is, unless they work as independent contractor physicians in which case they will make (almost) equivalent amounts before taxes.

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