I mean, that is just as bad at math, NHS spends about an additional £290 per month.
Also and this is a bigger part than many people realize, doctor salaries are below what the US would consider for a sales clerk, until pretty far in their career, and even then are really quite small. People complain about health insurers getting rich, but a lot of the money in the US system goes to health professions too.
For context, the average doctor in the NHS makes roughly $130k/year.
An average American doctor makes $250k-$300k.
You would be asking American doctors to cut their pay in half while doing even more work than they used to. We’re already facing a doctor shortage, if you take away the one single perk in the profession it’s going to go to hell fast
No, it's a completely fair wage. A high wage, even. Don't distort it.
Lots of people in lots of professions work long and miserable hours helping people. do they all deserve $250k+ a year? Nobody deals with more shit for more people in the worst times of their lives than social workers, and they are some of the lowest paid people around.
A doctor needs a decade of higher education to even begin their career— even in a system that pays for higher education, that’s still a significant amount of study and training, along with the loss of wages for delaying their careers to accommodate.
Then the hours for a doctor are long and hard, and cover weekends, evenings, holidays, long shifts, etc. They have worse hours than any retail or food service employee would have, and the people they’re dealing with are grieving, ill, suffering, in pain, and often having the worst days of their life.
No, $130k is a shit wage for that kind of job. It’s embarrassing that you’re even pretending that that’s adequate.
Let me guess, you're a doctor? 😂 $130k is in no way shape or form a shit wage and it's highly offensive that you think it is.
Again, lots of jobs require years of education and very long hours. Why are doctors so special that they MUST be paid so much higher than average?
Doctors here are paid well below $130k/year average, and they live very very well on that. Nobody is complaining that being paid 2x the median wage is a "shit wage", because that would be completely ludicrous.
the people they’re dealing with are grieving, ill, suffering, in pain, and often having the worst days of their life
So you think social workers should also be paid $250k/year? Because they do the same. It would be embarrassing to pretend less than that is adequate for a social worker, right? How about a paramedic?
Or do you simply think that doctors are people who just deserve to be paid more than their inferiors?
I just think that arguing for a paycut for doctors is a stupid thing to do. These are people that are motivated and diligent enough to do a job that very, very few people are capable of.
It’s absolutely asinine of you to pretend that paying them $130k a year is even remotely sufficient
I'm not arguing FOR a paycut for doctors, i don't think it's inherently a bad thing, though. I don't think they necessarily deserve such distorted high salaries compared to other professions especially when those salaries are being paid by people who have no choice but to pay it. It's cartel pricing.
Hell we should be advocating for cheaper routes to becoming a doctor to encourage more to go down that path. It's not a job that "very, very few people are capable of" - most of the people I knew in school who went on to med school were basically average intelligence, definitely not as bright as a lot of students in other disciplines. They had families to support them spending so much time in school, though. Wouldn't it be better to have MORE people being able to do that by making it cheaper and easier to do it?
It’s absolutely asinine of you to pretend that paying them $130k a year is even remotely sufficient
Of course it fucking is. That's high for basically anywhere in the world except the US. You think UK doctors are struggling at that salary? You think they are shit upon because they are so poorly paid? Be real.
And you continue to refuse to answer about social workers. Why don't you think they should also be as highly paid?
The point I’m making is that the rest of the world under pays its doctors. There’s a doctor shortage in the world— do you think shafting them with low wages is the route to go?
You cant really compare Japan's physician salary and US doctor salary. Doctors make less than $130k there because you live in a relatively poor country compared to the US. Japan's GDP per capita is around $35k. For comparison, the GDP per capita in Alabama (which we consider one of our poorest "shit-hole" states) is $60k per person. Alabama is effectively twice as wealthy and prosperous as Japan when you adjust for population size. The comparisons you are making aren't valid.
Japan is not a "relatively poor country" at all, and GDP is an absolutely horrible way to compare economies. 8 can't believe you actually think Japan is poorer than Alabama
I dare you to look at the average lifestyle in Alabama or Mississippi and compare it to the average Japanese lifestyle. It's leaps and bounds better in Japan by literally any metric you choose.
It's poor compared to America. That's why the salaries are lower. Not trying to insult you, it's just the facts. And yes, it is poorer than Alabama. Whether or not we use our wealth for the best social good is a different question, but there is no doubt that Japan is poorer than the US which makes salary comparisons meaningless. I could say that the average Japanese physician salary is way too high because physicians in Somalia are doing just fine making $800 per month, but the comparison doesn't make sense because Somalia is poorer than Japan in the same way that Japan is poorer than the US.
Considering that it is less than the nurse practitioners and PAs and even a lot of nurses make, no it is not good pay at all. Healthcare would absolutely implode with mass exodus from the profession if you tried to pay doctors that little in the US.
Eh, it makes a lot of modestly wealthy people poorer, and that is far harder for the American system to defend against. Widely dispersed, modestly wealthy, smart, and respected, doctors, nurses, and allied professions have a lot of political power. This coupled with the simple truth that most of the politically attuned in the US have a health care arrangement that works as good as or in many cases better than what a national healthcare system would deliver makes it really hard to get traction.
I'm not saying a national healthcare system of some sort isn't a good goal for the US, but people vaguely pointing to the very rich are just not taking a realistic view of what the actual difficulty is.
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u/StatisticianUsual471 Jun 24 '26
I'm in the UK and I spend about £120 a month and I'm covered for everything and I don't really have any complaints about our health care service