[arebours]

First of all thanks for this comment. That's a lot of interesting input.

To be honest I don't really see any reason to treat doctors differently than other professionals. There are plenty of difficult jobs that people's lives depend upon but I've yet to see a career path forcing trainees or juniors to go through such hard conditions for several years for pennies.

> Further work hour restrictions could turn the 15-year training process into a 16 or 17 year process. Fair enough, this could solve the problem. But really? From a purely economic perspective, this is silly.

From a purely economic perspective everyone works too little for too much. Why don't we start to treat residents like human beings, cut the long hours and pay them decently. Where do we find the money? Maybe in regular doctors' sacks - the difference in pay before and after residency is crazy. In 2017 residents went on a country-wide strike over working conditions in my country (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41777785) and it's said they'll go on another one this year.

As a side note I think a lot of issues in health service is a lack of proper management. Every time I'm in a hospital I can't help to notice hiring someone like an office manager, who's only job is to smooth communication between workers and patients and workers themselves would be huge.

[needlesurgeon]

The salaries of resident physicians are often available online. Here are some example salaries:

https://medschool.ucsd.edu/som/medicine/education/residency/...

https://med.nyu.edu/medicine/education/residency-compensatio...

http://www.myparo.ca/starting-residency/#salary-and-benefits

While these salaries may be dramatically different than what the doctors make when they finish residency, you'll see they're decent.

That being said: as a first year resident I once did the math and found that based on the number of hours I was working per month, I was making less than minimum wage.

Could we pay residents better? Absolutely. But, my suspicion is that people would still want to be doctors even if you paid residents half of what they currently made. I don't think medical school admissions would sky-rocket if you paid residents twice as much as they were making right now.