Primary-Care Doctors: Saying No to $191,000 a Year

Primary-Care Doctors: Saying No to $191,000 a Year

This is ridiculous, and this kind of thing matters to me a lot, because the way I treat my body, I'm sure to need a good doctor soon. But... The author of this article so casually signs on to the idea that $191,000 a year is not enough for a general practitioner to make ends meet because of their astronomical student loan debt. Hmm, let's just do the math, shall we?

The author suggests that student loans for doctors can be as high as $500,000 when undergraduate school and all other expenses are factored in. Very, well. If we consider a 15 year loan, at 5% interest for $500,000 that's $48,000 a year to service the debt. This leaves the poor, helpless, underpaid doctor with $143,000 for all the other expenses he or she may have. That seems pretty damn good to me. Let's remember, everyone else has loans too... sure, a doctor's may be higher than most, but I say bollocks to this idea that general practitioners need a 50% raise to solve the problem. What we need is for us to understand the nature of supply and demand.

Now, let me be clear, everyone deserves proper health care, and we NEED GPs, but the problem is that too many "doctors" are heading off to careers in specializations. Ostensibly, this is because they need more money to pay their bills, but the truth is they're just greedy and have dollar signs in their eyes. Hey, I'll be the first to say more power to 'em, but at the end of the day, not every doctor is smart enough to be a neurosurgeon. I know we all want to think that our GP could have done anything, and we're the luckiest patient in the entire world, but the fact is, what I need is a GP who is just smart enough to send me to the smarter doctor, and I only need that about 1% of the time. The other 99%, I need some more tetracycline.

Enough's enough... you want $800,000 a year as a cardiac surgeon? I bet you do! But the truth is, most doctors don't have the brains to pull that off. Stop watching Grey's Anatomy and face the facts, most of you are not cut out for a life in the top level, medical world.