So I heard that the 80hr/wk is just an average per month, not sure if it's true. But i'd be fine with them keeping the 80 hours, as long as it is by week. As I understand it now, if you have one week where you only work 50, they can work you 90 the next three, or two easy weeks and two 100+hr weeks, etc
Something I think a lot of pre-meds and med students, along with maybe residents who have never had any other "real" job, don't understand is that in the past it was never "about" the hours. That is, attendings and program directors weren't pushing residents to work 90, 100, 120, or however many hours per week, and thus are dissatisifed now that residents are limited to 80. The older docs will say that it was just about getting your work done. You arrived at the hospital early in the morning, did whatever you were supposed to do all day, stayed at the hospital for overnight call, did whatever you were supposed to do the next day, then went home when your work was done. Rinse and repeat. Nobody was thinking about whether you did or did not work X number of hours.
And what I think a lot of people don't understand is that many jobs, especially higher professions, aren't (or at least traditionally aren't) hours-based work. Medicine, law, corporate management, heck, even lower-level white collar jobs like accounting and computer programming, if you're working as a salaried employee rather than a contractor, are not wage jobs. It's not like being a welder or a union plumber where you sign a contract agreeing to work for $X per hour, punch a time card when you show up, punch a time card when you leave, and collect your paycheck. Instead, you agree to work for a salary of $X per pay period (usually a month or 2 weeks) and your job is to get the work assigned to you done, or, if you're an independent professional like a lawyer or a doctor, you decide (at least theoretically) how much you will charge for your services and how much time you will spend working.
That's really why the old-school docs hate the 80 hours restriction--not for the specific number of hours, but for the approach to the profession in general, the way of thinking about what it means to be a doctor, inculcates. If you listen to them, they complain a lot about younger med school grads considering medicine "shift-based work" and having an "employee mentality." Medicine was supposed to be about being an absolute top-level expert at diagnosing and treating disease, about doing whatever it takes to get a patient cured or healed or whatever. And it was that that gave medicine the clout, the power, the prestige (including the ability to demand high incomes) that it had.
Yes, it's true that there were probably some changes that needed to be made--as some point out, when these older docs went through the process there just wasn't as much that could be done for patients, and average hospital stays were much longer, so you actually got some sleep while on call. What these older docs perceive, however, is that when instead of being independent professionals who are ready to take full responsibility and assume leadership, doctors exhibit a "that's not my job" attitude or can wash their hands of everything medical the minute they reach a certain limit of hours and clock out, the power, prestige, and influence of the medical profession is reduced. And I think they're right about that. IMO, anyone who is so concerned with clocking out has no right to complain about NPs and PAs encroaching on doctors' turf, not to mention decline in doctors' incomes.
