Edwin Leap comments on "How Much Should Doctors Make" in a recent post.
How much should they make? Just taking the perspective of a primary care physician, it's hard to feel sorry for someone making $130,000 a year, right?
What sucks about this situation is that this income quickly gets spent in paying off school loans, the high costs of malpractice insurance, and all of the other stuff that people deal with.
I've got lots of friends with over $200,000 in student loans. Some are married to doctors, making the overall educational debt load $400,000. After school, daycare, mortgage and the other things we all deal with, they are also among the ranks of those living from paycheck-to-paycheck.
But even then, they seem to do pretty well. They're far from homeless. And they've got things that other people don't.
So how much should they make? How much should anyone make? Professional athletes, hedge fund managers, recording artists, attorneys? (Of course, our culture makes what they have to offer more important than health--can't afford meds but can pay to see a hockey game.)
As Kevin, MD reminds us on his blog, it is true that US physicians make more than physicians in other countries...but so do people in other professions.
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