[kuzimoto]

That is true, but if you're the type of person that likes to help others it's much easier to become a teacher than doctor.

Also, if you are a doctor and your primary motivation is helping people, wouldn't you want to help many people with simple problems, than few people with highly complex problems (which most likely have a higher risk of failure)? There is already a shortage of doctors doing the easy stuff.

I just don't see the incentive for doing difficult procedures other than with money.

[tanr54ok]

> Also, if you are a doctor and your primary motivation is helping people, wouldn't you want to help many people with simple problems, than few people with highly complex problems (which most likely have a higher risk of failure)?

Your analysis completely falls flat here. Not all doctors are motivated by the same things and yet most of them would consider their primary motivation helping people.

Neurosurgeons are a prime example. They would very much prefer few complex cases (not everyone gets a brain tumor thankfully) as their way to maximize benefit rather than manage cholesterol meds for 100s.

Speciality surgeons by their nature are motivated by a certain degree of risk.

The incentive for doing difficult procedures is often because they are challenging. Compensation for doctors in the US isn’t fully correlated with difficulty either... with no offense to my dermatology colleagues making more than most general surgery sub specialists.

[kuzimoto]

> Not all doctors are motivated by the same things and yet most of them would consider their primary motivation helping people.

That's fair. I probably over-emphasized the money part of it.

> The incentive for doing difficult procedures is often because they are challenging.

We can assume that since doctors aren't doing this for free or at least cheap already, that they require at least some amount of compensation. To return to my original point, if you force doctors to perform procedures on people that can't afford them, and the amount they receive is less than they want, then there be a greater shortage of such doctors.

> Compensation for doctors in the US isn’t fully correlated with difficulty either... with no offense to my dermatology colleagues making more than most general surgery sub specialists.

Not directly anyway, it's probably more supply/demand. Low supply of neurosurgeon means high cost. Whether that's from artificially suppressing the supply of these doctors or because it's very challenging is up for debate.

I'd guess dermatologists make so much because people are more willing to spend money on that sort of work.