Same thing happened to me with a plumber 12 years ago.

I spent a couple hours on YouTube and now I can solder my own copper pipes, install a new toilet and anything else I need.

Even being a software engineer I couldn’t compete with the hourly rate of a plumber so it makes financial sense for me to do the work myself.

But plumbers have to deal with a lot of nauseating stuff. "Amount of nauseating substances you have to deal with" should be a huge factor in pay rate.

What do you think doctors do? My last visit involved their fingers, a glove, and my butt.

Okay, so a $200 surcharge every time they have to deal with butts. $100 for urine, $50 for vomit. Charge it to the insurance anyway, they're used to paying $40000 a day for a hospital bed, they can pay $200 for dealing with a butt.

Plumbers have to deal with the aftermath of butts MUCH more often and they don't have the luxury of someone's insurance they can just throw arbitrarily high charges to.

You realise there’s medical professionals who deal with poop right?

There’s also the whole ‘all your clients are sick, some are contagious’ thing.

I’m not saying america isn’t insane, but to try and pretend plumbers have it far worse isn’t quite accurate.

Okay, so pay those poop-doctors double salary? They're basically gastrointestinal plumbers.

doctors are paid roughly equivalent, and the cost of healthcare is substantially lower in other companies, so I’m not really sure what you think you’re solving here, but I don’t see your plan ever working either.

And yet ironically, in the US at least, there’s a decent chance that plumber actually makes more than a physician.

Unlikely, but if he does it’s because he’s the “owner of a plumbing business” not just a plumber.

Possibly upto a point, if you factor in that the physician has to contend with paying back $400K in loans and $1M+ in lost income from not working during earlier years in life.