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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Okay, what I'm getting from this is that pharmacists make lots of money, and it's a really good bang-for-your-buck proposition.

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It used to be. There are now far more pharmacists than jobs so their wages and quality of life at work are plummeting. Read basically any thread at pharmacy subreddit or sdnforum. They barely start out at $80k to $100k, with over $200k of debt, terrible work hours and scheduling, and no future increases in income or job security (actually decreases).

The excess of pharmacy schools looking to make an easy buck on tuition also makes it so they let anyone into pharmacy school. There is literally no entry exam or requirement to get in other than ability to pay, i.e. take on taxpayer funded student loans.

The whole business itself got squeezed by the handful of large health insurers left, who control the money, such that even grocery stores are shutting down their pharmacies.

This is false. The PCAT is required by most schools.

Yes, technically many schools require it, but the requirement is being dropped by more and more schools every year, and employers don’t care which school you come out of, so your competition is greatly increased.

And it’s not like med school or many other grad school options where you have to take MCAT, which is far more rigorous than PCAT anyway, but since the graduate of a pharmacy school that doesn’t require it is the same as one that does in the job market, it effectively nullifies the bar an entry exam might set.

https://www.studentloanplanner.com/getting-into-pharmacy-sch...

It's like 6 years to get a degree that AI should replace though.

Physician assistant might be the next best thing in that space, also 6 years, and a pretty high median salary.

Not to undervalue a pharmacist's other functions, but you don't really need AI... you just need a bot to pull orders off a shelf and file online insurance forms.

I'm thinking more for smart insight into possible drug interactions. Since they may not know all the drugs you are on. My parents had doctors that both prescribed things and neither we're aware of it. So if you just pull orders you are doing the bulk of the busy work but not fully replacing the pharmacist.

With approaches like Amazon's PillPack and CVS Multidose, it's not clear why either AI or a pharmacist is needed.

Pharmacist jobs at a drugstore, grocery store, Walmart, Costco are probably not the road to riches. Managing the pharmacy at a major hospital with lots of specialized meds is probably a good gig.

Other professional schools are not listed or they’d be much higher

The major matters a lot.

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