Comment by ftheama | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ftheama | Hacker News Reader

>In 2008, the world turned against bankers, because many profited by exploiting their expertise in a rapidly accelerating field (financial instruments) over others’ ignorance of even basic concepts (adjustable-rate mortgages). How long before we software engineers find our profession in a similar position?

How long until doctors find themselves in a similar position? Medical bills are, after all, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US, and US doctors are the highest paid on Earth.

Meanwhile, software gets ever more cheap and plentiful, and programmers literally give away much of the fruits of their labor for free under permissive licenses. Yet it's supposedly programmers that are in need of reflection and humbling.

Programmers are effectively being punished--by the anti-tech worker protests in the Bay Area, a hostile media (Gawker, Mother Jones, to name a few), and by the incessant push for more cheap, indentured labor in the form of H-1Bs--all because we have not yet organized ourselves into a protectionist racket to gouge the citizenry in the same way doctors have.

Unlike doctors, we have little prestige, yet we are still able to earn high-ish salaries, and that makes us an easy target for resentment: "How dare these 'coders' earn $100k when a lot of them don't even have degrees! I have an MA in Journalism, and yet I struggle to pay my bills!"

The backlash the author predicts is already underway, but not for the reasons he cites.

> How long until doctors find themselves in a similar position? Medical bills are, after all, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US, and US doctors are the highest paid on Earth.

Blame medical insurance companies. Physicians must charge 10x what something actually costs because insurance companies will only pay 1/10 of the bill. This insurance company bullshit works all fine and dandy, until it lands on a poor uninsured bloke.

Ask yourself: "why the hell should a medical insurance company be for-profit?" Why should the top 5 medical insurance companies make _billions_ of dollars in _profit_ _every_ _month_ ?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2014/02/12/is-the-prof...

Responses like this demonstrate just how well doctors have, with their high-prestige, managed to near-completely insulate themselves from just criticism.

"A clearer way to think about this is profits -- and insurers aren’t where the big profits in the health-care system go. In 2009, Forbes ranked health insurance as the 35th most profitable industry, with an anemic 2.2 percent return on revenue. To understand why the U.S. health-care system is so expensive, you need to travel higher up the Forbes list. The pharmaceutical industry was in third place, with a 19.9 percent return, and the medical products and equipment industry was right behind it, with a 16.3 percent return. Meanwhile, doctors are more likely than members of any other profession to have incomes in the top 1 percent."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/13/w...

Don't the physicians' associations artificially limit the number of students/graduates in a specific field? I had dinner with one urologist and he was boasting how great it was that there were no other urologists around and about his new house etc. I asked him how that surely wouldn't be corrected shortly by another doc serving the same area. He found it to be rather humorous, and explained there was very little new competition, even as many of his current colleagues were retiring.

> How long until doctors find themselves in a similar position? Medical bills are, after all, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US, and US doctors are the highest paid on Earth.

Physician salaries are not the reason why average health care costs in the US are higher than the average in other developed countries—physician compensation is a very small part of the total overhead.

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