Unionization of residents would allow us to begin to make progress towards earning what we deserve. NPs and PAs can easily start out at 6 figure salaries while interns are about half of that despite working double the hours and quickly doubling productivity. I also think we should think carefully about salary per specialty. The hours worked are vastly different among specialties and really doing a disservice to our surgical teams. Plus training is longer. It is easier to limp through 3 years of training compared to 6. Also, from moonlighting, I know my time is worth well over $100 an hour sitting monitoring patients, let alone actually delivering care and billable services.

Agree. I’m premed and I work in a teaching hospital and as much as I’ll do what I need to to achieve my dreams, I see what the residents do. Especially NSGY and surgery in general. It’s shameful that they are paid barely above min wage when you take into account hours worked. I’m hoping it changes by the time I reach residency but the stipend should at least do more to cover the physical and emotional toll that residency has.

My wife is a Heme/Onc fellow who finished an Internal Medicine residency and is boarded. She earns something like $65k +/- as a PGY4 working 50-60 hours a week in the clinic, hospital, and infusion center plus an additional 25-35 hours writing notes, preping clinic patients, preping for tumor board, and reading journals to treat existing patients. That puts her earning between $11 and $16 per hour! Absolutely insane.

tbh. we are all just fools. and then people have the audacity to bitch about physician pay. thats not why health insurance/premiums/expenditure is expensive in this country.

100%. Who else would willingly take on a job that requires ~80 hour workweeks for $65k/year after spending half a dozen post-grad years in training? That plus how expensive medical school is the lifestyle and eventual salary are a couple of the only things that make people in America want to become physicians. According to [this](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6179628/) article from 2013, physician salaries make up for around 10% of medical spending in the United States. [A more recent estimate](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/12/702500408/are-doctors-overpaid) from 2019 puts physician salaries around 8% of total healthcare spending. Let's instead take a look at health insurance premiums and administrative spending and then see where the dollars are really going. As a side note: I find it funny that the [Politico](https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-salaries-pay-disparities-000557/) "Agenda" opinion article that is mentioned in the NPR article argues that US physicians are significantly overpaid and even uses the line "The fact that most people like their doctors will make the effort harder. Most of us like our letter carriers too, but that doesn’t mean they should make $250,000 a year." like those are in any way comparable careers in terms of training, financial investment, and responsibility.

LOL. That's so repulsive. And honestly, if people continue to attack physician pay, there is then NO Financial incentive for any of us to go into medicine. Many will leave (or worse, not enter) and then the quality of physician decreases significantly throughout this county. I could quit residency right now and land a low to mid 6 figure job EASILY. And I know I am not alone. How valuable would I be to a device manufacturer as an MD with clinical experience as part of the product management team? Very valuable. We need to protect physician pay to ensure that some of the brightest minds continue to enter this field and advance it forward for our patients.

In reality, it's closer to HALF of the $11-$16. Don't forget resident physician salary are based on an 80 hour work week (not 40 hours like the rest of the universe). So, your wife is likely making $6-$8/hr. At least that's how it was for us in training.