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Comment by omgwtfbyobbq | Hacker News Reader

Some of it does, but most of it does not. I believe most residents make something like $50k-$60k/year, and work ~60-80 hour weeks.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Residency/comments/hdx3gw/no_laughi...

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Can confirm this comment. Residents earn ~60-70K/year (usually close to 60K) and work ~60-65 hours/week (not 80 hours/week; there's a bit of exaggeration in that number). My wife is a current US medical resident and we have a lot of friends who are at various US residency programs.

Yes but how much is the subsidy and how much goes towards expenses the hospital only has due to the resident? For example the subsidy also covers the resident's malpractice insurance but the hospital isn't profiting from that. It also looks like there is the IME, a system where all Medicare payments are increased proportional to the number of residents intended to cover the extra work and expenses of training residents. So it's a rather thorny question and probably depends on the hospital (how many Medicare patients they have, etc). I imagine it's like NIH grants where the overhead is like 40% - substantial but I think the work done by the residents is likely to be a significant fraction of the value.

I believe residents need to have an attending sign off on everything they do, so while they could increase premiums indirectly, I don't know by how much. If anyone is named in a lawsuit, I think it would be the attending since the buck stops with them, and they should carry their own malpractice insurance in addition to the hospital's.

Based on what I've read, I suspect residents are very profitable for hospitals, even if they use a significant portion of the grant.

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