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Comment by bawana | Hacker News Reader

We could make more doctors if medical school tuition was lower and new doctors were paid more than a garbage man. But The cabal that is the hospital and pharma lobby won’t allow it

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It's got the lawyer problem. Bimodal income distribution. Some doctors make bank, some doctors work at a corner office in a mall.

Really if you wanted to revolutionize doctor-ing then i think creating a pathway from enrolled nurse all the way to consultant doctor would be the way to go. That should probably be a twenty year journey but it would open it up a lot.

I've thought about this for a long time. There should be a pathway from nurse to doctor. And maybe even from other allied health professionals too.

Median residency salary for a doctor in the US is something like $65k (probably about twice what sanitation workers make, though I'm too lazy to look it up). That's somewhat low relative to other jobs requiring the same education, but not particularly out of range. Lawyers do better at that stage of their careers for sure, but we have plenty of post-docs making far less. I don't see that this is much of an argument in context.

To be fair, most post-docs dont have an average debt of 200k. When I looked at STEM grad school they paid you if you were willing to do some teaching/grading. I dont believe post docs average 80+ hour weeks either.

Did you mean half of what sanitation workers make? Garbage men are making way more than $65k in urban centers.

What’s the average monthly debt payment for a typical resident? That will tell you a lot more about what their actual income looks like.

$200/300. Everyone uses income based repayment plans. It's literally impossible to make standard payment plan monthly payments on a residents salary (assuming a average debt).

Those payments don't even reach the principle though, so it's more just kicking the can down the road.

If you're going to include long term assets then you need to include the rest of the career too. That's the way residents actually look at the problem, after all. "Doctors" do well. Residents struggle a bit in comparison, but not really that much relative to their other post-graduate-degree compatriots.

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