| My wife is a resident physician. I'm a software engineer. I will out earn my wife for most of our careers - even with her at a $250k salary. My wife will eventually out earn me, but I doubt her career wages ($/hour) will ever come above mine. It's really easy to rip on doctors when you only look at a single data point without understanding the larger picture. That $250k salary looks outrageous because you're ignoring all of the opportunity cost that went to get there. * 4 years of med school. $40k tuition/year. $160k in principal total. * 4 years of med school. No salary. $100k/year opportunity cost. $400k total. * 4 years of residency. $60k salary. Yay, she's making an income. Boo, it's literally all going towards student loans. $80k/year opportunity cost. $320k total. * Congrats, you're now an attending. You're living the "good life". Oh, don't forget that $160k of tuition, it's full cost is roughly $300k. * $400k + $320k + $300k = ~$1M in the hole. That doesn't include a bunch of misc. expenses - exams, re-locations, interviews (residency programs don't pay for your travel). During that entire time, my wife is consistently outworking me by 50% to 100%. Step exams, board exams, residency interview season (holy shit that's a stressful time), volunteering, research, etc, etc, etc. Even when she's an attending, she still has a bunch of things she needs to do to maintain her licensing. This is also $1M in the hole in a critical part of building a life/savings. A good portion/all of that $1M could be going towards long term investments like retirement, college funds, etc. We're basically 10 years behind on retirement. That's easily $500k of interest lost. ---- Physician pay is only 8.6% of health care costs [0]. You could cut physician salaries in half and the effects on your health care would be trivial. [0] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/compensation-issues/ph... |