dr-exmedic.com

As someone who’s lived in a city like Pittsburgh, where a health care entity has become the region’s largest employer, I find stories like this one from the Wall Street Journal moderately amusing–but I suppose I shouldn’t chuckle at reporters too much; I sometimes forget how easy it is to see a trend from within the healthcare industry compared to someone who is outside.  This story probably wouldn’t have even been worth blogging if it hadn’t been for this comparison:

Greater inequality is a risk, too. In health care and other service industries, there tends to be a wider income gap between what the highest- and lowest-paid workers earn than there is in manufacturing. Surgeons can have salaries in the high six figures, while personal-care attendants often make little more than minimum wage.

First off, the WSJ is one of the nation’s most conservative newspapers–they still don’t have funnies, for God’s sake!–so I find it odd to hear them call “greater inequality” a risk.  More significantly, I really don’t think it’s all that fair to suggest the pay disparity between physicians (the average anesthesiologist, the top-paying specialty, makes $184,340 a year) and patient care techs ($14,000 a year, assuming $7/hr, which by the way would be low in most urban areas) is any different between the CEOs of manufacuturing companies and their employees.  In small companies, the gap between CEO and line worker may be smaller, but then you have the larger companies, which can pay their CEOs literally millions of dollars a year even while the company is failing.

The comparison is even sillier when you consider what the surgeon and patient care techs had to do to get to their respective positions.  Sure, the surgeons referred to in the story make 14-15 times (or more) as much as, say, a nurse’s aide.  This is after eight years of school and five years of residency–13 years total.  A home health aide can expect to spend 3 months in school (and while it’s not clear how many hours a week you spend in class, I’m willing to bet it’s less than during the first 2 years of med school–and far less than the 80 hours per week limit of residency, and is the sort of work that can be done by just about any average person who’s willing.

I hope no one takes this as me trying to denigrate any lower level of health care worker–far from it, actually; I’ve been there and done that, and I realize how much we need every piece of the system.  It’s just that comparing essentially unskilled workers to people with advanced degrees is like comparing Muhammad Ali with the kid who used to take my lunch money in third grade; someone with lots of training, experience, or education should be rewarded for all that work.

If a reporter wants to complain about pay disparities, he or she might be better off looking at the pay disparity between an MD and someone who’s spent eight years pursuing a PhD in, say, English lit.  Now that’s a low-paying field for as much as you put into it….

Filed under: Economics, Medicine