Readers push back on Yglesias’ claim that physicians get paid too much:
I am a highly specialized physician and Obamacare supporter who is likely be considered one of those “overpaid” doctors. I think what is often missed is what hidden expenses and opportunity costs, in total, those reimbursements defray. I was in school (paying tuition) or in training (earning $20-$30K per year) for 12 years after college and collecting more than $150K in debt at a public medical school while others my age and background were moving up in their careers, earning increasingly higher wages (some made millions in the Internet bubble), increasing their retirement nest egg, buying houses, etc. I made my first paycheck from “overpaid” reimbursement at the ripe age of 33.
Another reader:
As an attending, my husband works a minimum of 55 hours a week. He gets four weeks of vacation a year. He’s often on call weekends and nights, and works several holidays a year. We crack the six-figure mark in salary. (Medical students live on about $15,000 in loans a year; residents and fellows make between $40,000 and $60,000 a year.) One quarter of our take-home pay goes to pay student loans and will for many, many years to come.
I’m not going to pretend we don’t live a comfortable life. Of course we do. We own a mortgaged 1,200 square foot house. We have insurance. We can put away for retirement and college for our kids and we own two cars. Most Americans don’t make six figures. But I’m sorry, my prematurely grey husband is not responsible for rising healthcare costs. He makes way less than several of his siblings in the business world who have less training, work fewer hours, and do, frankly, a little less for the world.
Another points to possible problems with the studies that Yglesias cites:
First: Not all physicians, or specialties, are the same.
I’m an IT manager for a big global company. I actually earn more money than a friend of mine who is a pediatrician. But my salary doesn’t hold a candle to other MDs in specialties like vascular surgery or anesthesiology. Which of those doctors is “overpaid”? Which are not? None of these studies bother to make this distinction. They are all lumped into the same category as “doctors” and then use average salaries, rather median salaries, across the totality of the United States.
Which leads to other big problem with these studies: beware of any study that compares the United States, as a whole, to tiny homogeneous nations like The Netherlands. There is no way to compare the two – even “adjusting” for population size. The US is too large and diverse to make those kinds of comparisons and studies that do so should be disregarded as invalid right from the start.
Another:
If we took Matt’s advice and cut their salaries to what looks to be the European average on his chart, they’d be making closer to $60k, once the costs of getting the job are taken into account. Given that you can get an IT job with just a couple years of training and experience and no overhead that pays $60k (or more), what idiot would bother going into medicine? The smart ones wouldn’t. Which is of course exactly what we want – stupid doctors.
And, for the record, my late father retired from medicine in 1989. He paid $24k in annual malpractice (Southern California) at that time. He recommended I not go into medicine. I’m in IT.
The Dish 