Willoughby said:
if i had any inclination towards medicine i think it is about eight years in this country....but i am at the moment in a university where the only oversubscribed subject is medicine..interesting that!
It's about eight years of post high school education, then about 3 to 7 years of residency training, depending on your specialty. Most will accumulate large debt completing the process, while simultaneously foregoing earning and savings until well into their thirties. From an investment standpoint, this puts them well behind the eight-ball if they expect to send their kids to college, pay off their houses and school debt, and put together a retirement savings by an reasonable age.
Now mind you, the 12-15 years after highschool are typically long and miserable, with very little social life, with often wrecked marriages, coupled with known negative health effects from the long hours and stress.
Then once you begin practice, the hours are significantly longer than the typical forty hours of the 9 to 5 world. There are countless hours on call where the individual is tied to his pager, unable to enjoy life like the rest of the world. Add to this countless hours in the hospital taking care of emergencies and sick patients.
Now would you be willing to shoulder this load if you had the "calling" ?
Would you be willing to give up so much of your life, away from your family and friends, sitting in a dimly lit call room in some hospital, studying, unable to sleep because your pager beeps the second your head hits the pillow?
Would you gladly give so much of yourself, so that people who decided not to work as hard as you have, can tell you that you make too much, the same people who spent their youth going home at five, and hanging out in bars with their buddies and relaxing on weekends, while you suffered ?
The notion of a "calling", the spirit of noble servitude with finite reward, sounds very appealing to those on the receiving end of the equation.
I have a suspicion that you don't mind sharing the benefit of health care, from the sacrificing doctors that provide it, yet begrudge their ability to
profit economically.
What about you ? Do you expect to profit according to the level of hard work and dedication you apply towards your career ? I would suspect that you might be willing to accept even larger compensation, and without guilt. So why do you so easily accept the hard work and dedication of your doctors as a "calling", not worthy of adequate reimbursement. I see you graciously accept the benefits of their hard work, and view it as entitlement.
What are they entitled to ?
