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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

General practitioners make something like 150k on average in the US. Specialists tend to make a lot more (upwards of double) and also tend to skew perceptions of doctors’ pay.

You could argue specialists should make less but considering how long it takes to become a doctor, how much work it takes to get there, how long you’re putting off real earning potential, school debt, etc., I do not consider 150k overpaid.

From a more practical angle, I don’t know how you could possibly find more doctors by lowering their earning potential.

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> From a more practical angle, I don’t know how you could possibly find more doctors by lowering their earning potential.

You certainly could if you were willing to accept people who are terrible at being a physician.

The notion that you can just throw more warm bodies at the problem is ludicrous

Other countries have double, even triple the number of physicians per capita. They also pay them a lot less. Are they all less competent? Are US filtering requirements actually all that predictive of future performance? Can we, say, see that MCAT scores really line up well with clinical performance? Because it's easy to be selective, but not so easy for the selectivity to be predictive of actual quality, especially when you are being selective before training starts.

But those countries also pay less in a lot of other fields as well. Developers make less in those countries than they make in the US.

I would be surprised if wages in most of those countries were not lower overall, not just for doctors.

General practitioners make more like 250k on average. 150k for general practitioners working in academics, but not overall.

They can make a lot more than 250K in less attractive places as well. But I believe the current cohorts of med students are more 'worldly' and in it for the money than in the past. They'll take getting paid 100K less so they can stay in a nice city and take another 50K less to work part time.

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