My wife is a resident physician. I'm a software engineer. I will out earn my wife for most of our careers - even with her at a $250k salary. My wife will eventually out earn me, but I doubt her career wages ($/hour) will ever come above mine. It's really easy to rip on doctors when you only look at a single data point without understanding the larger picture.

That $250k salary looks outrageous because you're ignoring all of the opportunity cost that went to get there.

* 4 years of med school. $40k tuition/year. $160k in principal total.

* 4 years of med school. No salary. $100k/year opportunity cost. $400k total.

* 4 years of residency. $60k salary. Yay, she's making an income. Boo, it's literally all going towards student loans. $80k/year opportunity cost. $320k total.

* Congrats, you're now an attending. You're living the "good life". Oh, don't forget that $160k of tuition, it's full cost is roughly $300k.

* $400k + $320k + $300k = ~$1M in the hole. That doesn't include a bunch of misc. expenses - exams, re-locations, interviews (residency programs don't pay for your travel).

During that entire time, my wife is consistently outworking me by 50% to 100%. Step exams, board exams, residency interview season (holy shit that's a stressful time), volunteering, research, etc, etc, etc. Even when she's an attending, she still has a bunch of things she needs to do to maintain her licensing.

This is also $1M in the hole in a critical part of building a life/savings. A good portion/all of that $1M could be going towards long term investments like retirement, college funds, etc. We're basically 10 years behind on retirement. That's easily $500k of interest lost.

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Physician pay is only 8.6% of health care costs [0]. You could cut physician salaries in half and the effects on your health care would be trivial.

[0] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/compensation-issues/ph...

Actually, you are wrong. PCPs start at 90-100k salary. If you are quoting gross income before expenses then its about 200k. The overhead of running a physicians office is high. In terms of specialists, it's come down quite a bit. Just check the ads in the back of professional journals. 400k is more like the 70s.

Also you can look at the training of all the recent physicians, - many are from abroad. Same thing that the Silicon valley industry has been doing , hiring foreigners at lower pay. Education for physicians abroad is FREE. Whereas here you have to go to college (>50k a year tuition x 4) AND medical school (60k a year x 4) and then training 3-7 years at low income (40k a year) and crap life style.

FYI, all of the numbers you listed are close, but not totally accurate. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23733575

That being said, the overall point is correct. There is a HUGE opportunity cost to becoming a physician. People would rather ignore that because it doesn't support their argument. It's much easier to cherry pick point-in-time data without looking at the larger picture.

Please post a citation

Perhaps you could post a citation yourself before asking it if others.

It's my perception, not saying it's necessarily universally applicable to the US or all types of doctors, that nobody sees a doctor any more. You see a nurse practitioner or a physicians assistant. There might be one actual doctor per practice.

So talking about what doctors make might be misleading.