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You get benefits as a resident. And you can't afford to max out your 401k/Roth until you're an attending, that's just a given. It's a temporary situation though- we're not saying 55k is ideal forever. And we're also talking about largely dual income households- 55k isn't enough on its own if you have a family and massive debt. As a temporary, short-term situation, however, it's not that bad is all I'm saying.
And we've got it better than all of them. Soooo... Yeah, still relevant, because we're still winning, and relative to everything, I'd still say we come out ahead.
Maybe I've just become jaded by the SPF forum, but I thought this was all really civil.
The time stamp of my post does not reflect on the most current postings of the threads. It should be viewed in a general sense and not taken as directed as a causal post to what was most recently posted.
I just sang this with your new lyrics with music video playing in background. Totally worth it. Come up with more!
Why do you keep comparing medicine to dentistry? They're not us, and we're not them. Residency is 100% optional for them.
Orthodontics residency is a privilege, not a right coming from dental school. The amount of money you make will be tremendous being an orthodontist, hence the tuition. Using that as an example doesn't really prove your point.
Closest thing I've got is the other 4-year professional programs for comparison. We could do physicians from other countries, which also tend to have poorly paid residencies and internships, just as the United States does- that would be a much more direct comparison.
The same could be said of many specialist fellowships- they increase your income and are not necessary to practice. Why shouldn't fellowships charge tuition?
Why should a service that makes money for the hospital be subsidized at all? The government could easily argue "oh, if you're making all this extra money, instead of paying them more, we'll just subsidize you less and you can keep paying them the same amount."
You mean as far as the government subsidizing fellowships? I can honestly say I'm not an expert on how much the government subsidizes those programs, but I do know it is much less than residency programs, probably because a fellow is less of a drain than a resident. And I think the point you make is what a lot of people are saying right now- the argument that indirect GME payments to hospitals are too high- be they for residents or fellows.
The only reason programs make any money off of residents is subsidies, basically. So, realistically, rather than a wage increase what should happen from a policy perspective is a subsidy cut. I don't want that, nor do any of us, but demanding higher wages is something I really feel will not serve us well from a policy perspective due to the subsidies the government gives us. They've been calling for cuts for years- imagine what they'd do if resident pay suddenly climbed up. The politicians would get all up-in-arms and say that, if they can afford to pay us more, obviously they can subsidize less, and we'd be right back to square one but with less funding than we started with.
I totally agree with you that a subsidy cut is what is in order rather than a wage increase, should subsidies actually be too high, which many people say they are. I don't really think higher wages are in order; sorry if it looked like I was arguing that. I was simply trying to make the point that fellows shouldn't have to pay tuition and MAY be underpaid in some cirucumstances- bearing in mind there is a lot of difference between a resident and a fellow.
The debt accrued is a direct result of the medical education system as it is now starting from high school. Rand Paul didn't even get an undergrad degree before going to med school at Duke. You can't do that now.
The major difference being that in dentistry you can start practicing the day after you graduate without any postgraduate training required. Getting OMFS, Orthodontics, Prosthodontics residencies are only extra icing, many of them only 1-2 years. Dental school's job from day 1 is to prepare you to be a general dentist after 4 years at the very least. Medical school at the end of 4 years gives you an expensive piece of paper on graduation only, in the eyes of state license boards. You're locked into postgraduate training if you want to practice.
But many of our complaints aren't rooted in postgraduate training issues- they're rooted in the way we both execute and finance undergraduate medical education. Blaming residencies for not paying enough when the training we're getting isn't up to par and the system by which we finance our education is ****ed is no way to approach the problem, let alone actually fix it.
I'm a cynic when it comes to mortgages. And this idea seems bad because I honestly think it's going to only add more issues. Especially when med students know very little about buying a house.
I thought about saying government funding like GME, but that's a huge cost I'm not sure Uncle Sam would or should front. This might look like a cop-out response, but, as evidenced by my above comments, I think hospitals are getting too much money out of GME, so an obvious answer is to "redistribute" some of that money. Then again, we're talking about quite a lot of funding. It basically comes down to the question of what you think is more important- leaving more money in the hands of hospitals, or reducing physician student loan debt.
WHAT?!!!!!!!!!?
While you have a point, especially for fields like EM and IM, that doesn't excuse the hospitals of abusing GME funding or resident workloads.
