Economic Trends
It seems that more and more of the internet friends we admire are diving into the economic pressures that are facing the healthcare industry as a whole. We know that we typically write on this blog and website about traditional personal finance topics, but we couldn’t resist the opportunity to give some updated numbers and a fancy graph about physician salaries. The summary is that younger docs are (still) financially much worse off then their slightly older colleagues.
I know that the most savvy of our followers [hi mom!] will recognize the graph and topic from a previous post that we published in 2018. Not much has changed then, at least in these data trends. The methodology we used to create this graph stands from them as well, and since we want to follow all of the cool kids (ie our friends that actually get published in peer reviewed journals), we have decided to simply direct you to the index with the methodology so that we can keep this post to the designated word limit. Also, writing is hard and we are lazy.
An Updated Graph
Not unexpectedly, the increases in medical school tuition continue to far outpace any gains in physician income. The graph below plots increases in medical school costs vs wage data for general pediatrics and internal medicine over the past 20 years. These two specialties represent a large proportion of primary-care physicians, a critical component of our healthcare system and to patient care. These salaries have not kept pace with average (non-physician) wages, let alone medical education costs.
Expectation Disconnect
We feel much of the burnout facing physicians results from a major disconnect between job expectations and reality. Being a happy, well-adjusted resident is difficult when working 80 hours a week (and only staying for additional time when it really is highly educational). And when those training years are over and a young physician finally arrives at their ‘grownup’ job, it’s not usually what they expected. Our goal is to educate people about their finances, so they can plan ahead. One can plan for almost anything, but it is difficult to plan for the unknown unknowns.
We’ll continue fighting to educate physicians about personal finance and the financial realities of working as a physician, even when those realities might not be as rosy when seen through your future glasses, compared to those you wore the first time you met your cadaver in anatomy class.
[The general methodology for the graph is as described in the 2018 version.]
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