Who Wants To Be a Doctor?

There was a time when call every other night barely phased me. I did it when I was in the ICU as a resident. It was an odd existence to show up at work at 8 AM one day and leave at 1 PM the next.

I would go home and hit the crib, wake up about 10 PM, catch Jay Leno and then slip back off to sleep. During those months the rest of the world just passed by. It is a good thing residents are in their 20s because it would kill me now.

In 1994-95 I had 2 weeks off and roughly about 20 other days off in a year. Yes, that means I worked most Saturdays and Sundays. I averaged about 90 hours a week in the hospital. I had no complaints because at least I was not a surgery resident.

An Air Force intern made about 40K in 1994-95 and that was high resident pay at the time. Low pay and long hours are the story for at least 3 years after medical school. Doctors are age 30 at a minimum before they can even think about making serious money.

Dan Fagan brought attention to the salaries of city employees recently and took flack. The point of his recent editorial is sound even if his calling out of individuals is a bit over the top.

I love APD officers. However, the argument they give me sometimes that overtime justifies their salaries is comical. Most of the APD officers want the big bucks associated with overtime. It pads the numbers especially near retirement. It is not a destructive force in their lives.

Overtime is a foreign concept to physicians. Medicare does not care if a gastroenterologist is performing an endoscopy at 3 AM. It turns out the nurses who come to help often get paid considerably better than the physician.

Benefits are also fair game. The numbers are often hidden as a way to slip things by the public. Employees pretend that cost should not count in the calculations. That is until they need it as an excuse for why Mayor Begich was not at fault for a soaring budget. After all, he had to fund those benefits. The circular reasoning is beyond justification.

One bothersome thing lost in this recent debate is how poorly teachers are compensated. They put in more than 40 hours a week. It is not uncommon for them to spend out of pocket for their students.

Granted, teachers have major issues with defending bad apples. They use tenure as an excuse at times. And the NEA is about as phony as it gets when they claim to care about educating kids. Still, at the end of the day, teachers perform an extremely important function to society.

The next the time the AEA contract comes up they should stay on strike until they are making on average 75% (9/12 months) of what other muni employees make.

Every time the salaries of teachers come up I think of Mike Dukakis. I went to a speech he gave in 1988 at Webster Hall. Mr. Dukakis asked how many people in the room were planning to go into teaching. There were 500 students in the room and nobody raised their hand.

One complaint in this country is that we cannot attract qualified people to be teachers because of the pay. Why should people go into teaching when they can make more money doing just about anything else for the government?

A typical primary care physician in this country makes about 150-200K a year. That number can be less for military or public health physicians in primary care. They are right up there with, uh, Anchorage city employees.

Talking salaries always gets people worked up. I am still waiting to meet the person who thinks they are overpaid while everybody else is underpaid.

What should be the priorities?

Commenters have attacked physician pay routinely. The ADN indirectly did it with one of its almanac features. Be careful what you wish for...

A future candidate may walk into historic Webster Hall looking for votes. A question may get asked of the audience, "Who here is planning on going into medicine?" What will we do if nobody raises their hand?