Hacker News Reader

Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

> NAME REDACTED, a 31-year-old anesthesiologist living in Manchester, England, earns about £51,000 ($67,000) per year for a 48-hour workweek. Inflation, which has been about 10% or higher in the U.K. for nearly a year, is devouring his monthly budget, he says.

That's insane. AFAIK, Anesthesiologists in the US make $400k/year MINIMUM.

(I redacted their name to prevent them from backlinking to this site.)

View on HN

And people on HN say that the wage disparity between EU and US is overblown.

Brief googling gives Average base salary £100,082

the guy in 51k probably just started in the job.

Only consultants will earn that, and only after they've been a consultant for several years (i.e. they've been working as a hospital doctor in total for somewhere between 12-20 years)

https://www.bmj.com/careers/article/the-complete-guide-to-nh...

The doctor quoted will likely be ST3 band, which means they've completed a 5 or 6 year medical degree, and then been a full-time "junior doctor" working in a hospital for 5 further years.

Doctors in the NHS are horrifically underpaid, and especially post-brexit there's a growing exodus to higher-paid countries (Australia, New Zealand, USA...).

Brexit is working as intended, yeey! More NHS funding ... oh what, wait, what... oh dear, the xenophobe conservative clowns were lying? Oh no! Never would have crossed my mind!

Given one of the primary justifications for not leaving the EU was to retain access to unlimited cheap labor for the NHS, it isn't easy to blame low medical worker wages on Brexit. If you want medical staff to make more money, removing their primary source of competition is a quick way to do that.

In practice of course Brexit has done no such thing as the immigration rules in the UK are still optimized for mass immigration, as the Conservatives are so much not xenophobic that they prefer to enrage their own voter base than restrict immigration by even small amounts.

As for healthcare spending, the massive jump in NHS spending during the pandemic more than consumed the former EU contributions. The EU funds did indeed go to the NHS and then a lot more on top. If the UK was still paying in, then inflation would be even worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com