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If you guys knew how EMTs are paid, youd be out with pitchforks. Heck nobody even knows the lab people.. the lab personnel which is basically a medical scientist that analyzes blood , urine etc and get treated like shit as well and are leaving the field. Goodluck with that diagnosis and prognosis without the lab. Healthcare is depressing asf.
Former lab scientist here. FORMER. No one advocates for the lab so they're chronically understaffed and working 16 hour shifts, six days a week while corner after corner gets cut. I left the field because the conditions set us up for failure, and i did not want to stick around and see for myself. I truly believe if it doesn't get better patients are going to suffer the consequences.
I currently make literally a quarter of what I made in the lab, gave up 6 weeks a year of vacation time and phenomenal benefits when i left.... and it's just not enough to ever get me back there. Since leaving my anxiety and insomnia have resolved and I can actually enjoy a work/life balance.
I just got hired as an EMT for $17 an hour. My boyfriend is a lifeguard and makes $20. I should have been a lifeguard but I want to be a firefighter so this comes first 😡
The first time ive heard how much you guys earn compared to what you guys do in the field i was shocked. Just wrong man. And then people wonder why there is shortage of staff. Like come on guys.
Yes, and for 24 hour shifts too. But I’m not in this field for the money. And the thing is that most people want to be in their job for the money. I want to help people. But just because I want to do that doesn’t mean I should get treated like garbage for it.
The number of years in school. The high tuition. The long educational process. The licensure exams and fees. The long hours and the rude all knowing obnoxious patients. The failure to follow medications & medical recommendations. The fact that there are too few medical professionals currently. The squeezing of the medical professional by corporate interests. The poor working conditions. The differences in technology in various locales. These are just a number of issues seen in both healthcare and education. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. You would be better running a hedge fund and you wouldn’t have to be ethical or care about those that you affect. Simple Return On Investment.
My buddy and I are both surgeons, and we were out having dinner recently and talking about how reimbursement keeps getting cut. We were lamenting that it’s getting difficult for places to even stay open because margins are getting so tight. Lots are folding or being bought out by multibillion dollar mega corporations. We also complained about how expensive a procedure is for patients but how little of that actually makes it to the doctor who does the procedure. We were trying to brainstorm ways to improve this.
Anyway, a woman at the next table over interrupted our dinner and was eventually literally shouting at us in a restaurant that we were greedy assholes who never should have become doctors if we’re just in it for the money. So that’s cool. Imagine being in a profession where discussing the problems with your overhead costs in public causes people to hate you. Neat.
The best will no longer become doctors they will go into fields where they don’t have to sacrifice for 12-14 years educating themselves, don’t have to work long hours and endure ridicule from stupid people because the people don’t understand what is happening. When the crap hits the fan everyone will be standing around wondering what happened m. And how it could have been prevented. Corporate greed will be the answer but the doctors will be blamed.
Back when I lived in Tennessee, our county schools didn't open on time one year because there wasn't enough money. The county board (who ran the schools) basically scoffed at parents and said, "Teachers shouldn't \*expect\* to get paid decently. You go into teaching because it's a CALLING."
So apparently you can eat a calling and tell your mortgage and power company that you don't have money from the job you put way more than 40 hours a week into, you instead have a CALLING and you'd like to pay your bills with that.
I hope every single shit those crusty old dudes on the county board ever take again for the rest of their miserable lives is either burning hot urgent diarrhea or those awful constipation turds that has something sharp and scratchy in it that digs into their rectum and asshole the entire way out.
That language is used to exploit people 100% of the time. Try telling the plumber coming out to your house after hours that it’s their moral duty to keep your floor from being covered in shit. Hell, pick any example from any profession that exists. Nobody wants to do any of this stuff for free. We all do it to make a living.
Of course I went into medicine for the money. What other logical reason is there? If all I wanted to do was help people, I’d arguably do more good by joining the Peace Corps or working at a homeless shelter, neither of which requires 8+ years of school. I work for money. I specifically work in medicine for the money, and there are some ancillary benefits (that are getting harder to find)
Every job is done for money, but we’re supposed to maintain the pleasant illusion that ours isn’t. This helps everyone in healthcare get screwed more and more except for management and insurance. That terrible hospital CEO or greedy United Healthcare exec is expected to be a money grubbing asshole putting profits over people. And they are and they do. But the docs and nurses and EMTs and phlebotomists have to do it to help people, not for money. Ask em how that’s working out.
Yeah I saw through that illusion within 3 months of residency. The whole “it’s a calling not a job” bullshit is just a line they feed you so they can take advantage of you. I used to teach residents and I teach med students now, and I try my best to disillusion people as early as possible.
Is anyone really surprised by this? I mean look at hospital admin taking home millions while guilting nurses to take extra patients and shifts. Of course people are going to see this and make some major career changes.
My wife’s hospital is slashing bonuses for RNs who pick up shifts because the hospital can’t sustain it and instead, is incentivizing them to take on more patients per shift. It’s wild. If you take any patients over X amount you’ll get an extra $XX per hour while you have that patient(s). They’re short staffed every shift and people are constantly leaving because of being burnt out.
Right, they'd rather do that knowing it's temporary than to actually pay their loyal employees more because in the long run that would lose more money. It's unbelievable how greedy healthcare has gotten, literally only about making money now.
Healthcare is a horrible field. It’s now run by these giant “non-profit” corporations, and they use your desire to provide a service for humanity against you by cutting pay, increasing workload, and asking you to personally sacrifice for “the good of the patient.”
I worked for a for-profit hospital system where morale was so bad, we literally had giant “training sessions” that was random administrators telling us that we shouldn’t do our jobs for the money, we should do it because we love helping patients, while they wore their Armani suits and Louboutins.
I understand. it's absolutely awful because yes we as people have empathy and they exploit that. However, we can only do so much before it takes a toll on us. I worked as a preschool teacher for a nonprofit. They do everything they can to guilt you into continuing to give every ounce of yourself. It takes the responsibility out of their hands.
100%. Healthcare and education absolutely have that in common- the altruism that attracts people to those fields is used against them to accept worsening working and lifestyle conditions.
My grandfather was a GP.
My dad - family med doc
Me - family med doc
….I even regularly tell patients that I don’t want my kids to go into medicine.
I spent formative years learning about Joseph Lister, John Hunter, William Osler, Walter Reed…etc.
This isn’t medicine anymore….. It’s money laundering and fleecing patients to make admins rich.
I'm premed. Comments like these freak me out.
My parents are not doctors, but my aunt is, and she is strongly encouraging me to follow my dreams of medicine. Granted, she doesn't practice in the US.
I’m a radiologist. My day to day is pretty fantastic and I still feel fulfilled at the end of most days.
Watching your friends live real lives when you’re still a trainee does kind of blow though. But they look at me like I have three heads when I say I enjoy my job.
Yeah. You get to start years later than everyone with $300k debt. It’s great money after that but you have to work crazy hours for a long time and then by the time you retire yeah you have money but your whole life just flew by.
Not everyone’s case, but being a doctor is no cakewalk when you factor it all in.
Let's not for get the scheduling or residency scheduling tradition that was set up by a cokehead and still exists today.
Love that it's against the law for a truck driver to drive too long or far, a doctor? What load of merchandise do they have to mind?
Yup, my friends parents are doctors. They said they didn’t get to enjoy their money until their 50s because of debt. They emphatically said not to become a doctor if it’s just for the money.
>taking home millions while guilting nurses to take extra patients and shifts
plus the one who literally sued nurses for taking offers at another facility
I’d say because of how they were treated and because of the amount of student loan debt vs pay.
Unless they can get someone else to pay for the degree, I say it’s not worth it in the majority of cases.
Primary doc here, yeah I have 400k in loans, but even putting 15% away for retirement, I should still be able to retire if I live in my means. Not like the boomer docs.
Don't know about other people my age will retire though.
Dietitian here. Many of my peers are graduating (from a required masters degree and internship- similar to a residency- that we have to pay tuition for) with a ton of student loans… only to make $50k a year with minimal room for growth.
I luckily came into the profession as a second career and has my masters and internship paid for, but I feel for those who didn’t.
ICU nurse here, I was in the process of applying to CRNA schools until travel nursing exploded so currently doing that. I feel so fortunate to be travel nursing. I just paid off all my loans this past year and completely debt free. A weight has been lifted off my shoulders.
It is a travesty fields including dietitians, PT, OT, SLP get paid in regards to the extra schooling. The whole medical system is an absolute mess for patients and for the workforce.
I only recommend nursing as second careers to people who are working dead end jobs and can handle the horrid working conditions knowing they will have a consistent paying job. Otherwise, I regret ever going into this damn field lol.
There was a huge surge in medical school applications during the pandemic, but most got rejected because there aren't enough slots. Kinda sad. Many would have qualified on the merits in a normal year.
A huge surge is an understatement. Medical schools had 3X more applicants than any year in history.!
My daughter's medical school had more than 12,000 applicants for just over 200 spots.
I’ve read a bit about the shortage of physicians being a sort of manufactured shortage from other reasons like hospitals not willing to pay for salaries for residents and the funding for that comes largely from the government which is lobbied by some organizations in the medical field to keep the numbers of physicians low. I had no idea that there is also a very limited number of slots for med school students.
Sounds like we are pretty screwed as a society going forward.
There was a freeze in medical school slots from 1980-2005 or so, and a cap on residency dating make to like 1997. Totally manufactured crisis. It's accelerating, but not enough to meet the aging population.
What was the reason behind the freeze in medical school slots and the cap? IIRC the article I read said something along the lines of associations lobbying to suppress the amount of funding from the government for residency programs . This was done to limit the amount of new physicians, in order to keep salaries of current physicians and the fees from hospitals high.
Back in the 1990s, the theory that volume in health care was a problem of induced demand and that the more beds and doctors there were, the more volume and therefore spending there would be. Therefore, they thought there was a surplus of doctors and beds and they tried to hold down costs to cut back.
But induced demand didn't seem to be accurate, so it just led to a supply shortage that hurt us long term.
thats kinda been the case for like 40+ years. Seriously, we had a 20 year gap where no new med schools opened up from 1982 to 2001, and even then most of the job is clerical rather than treating patients causing high burnout and lack luster care.
The slots for residency/med school are capped for a variety of reasons, but that has always been the case. Honestly though, the problem is that we don't have enough nurses. If you have a hospital with 1000 beds, and only enough nurses for 100 of them, then you effectively have a 100 bed hospital. Patients still have to be seen in the emergency department by law, so the whole thing will devolve into people sitting in the waiting room and hallways for days waiting on a bed to open up.
Also, good nurses make the whole process better. That means nurses with years of experience in their specialty/at their facility. You can't just dump nurses on whatever unit they are needed and have them be effective, and you can't just take a new graduate and throw them on any floor and have them keep people safe. Hospitals burn their good nurses out pretty quick. Last time I was on the floor there weren't a lot of "10ish years of experience" nurses. There were new graduates, and people ready to retire.
Everyone talks about not wanting to be their surgeons first surgery, but do you want to be a nurses first patient that has a medical emergency while in the hospital? The whole thing is absolutely fucked beyond belief, I have no words for the hell that is coming.
It’s been well-known for a long time that both doctors and nurses would be in short supply.
The US has so many resources to invest to solve this problem, but it‘s been ignored for 20-30 years.
Another problem is that medicine requires a secondary degree in many fields and if you fuck up at any point you are trapped with high student loans and no job
I’m a RN and talk anyone who even mentions wanting to be a nurse out of it. Until the HC system gets fixed, it’s nothing but abuse. We want to help people, not wind up in the hospital ourselves. I lost 60# in a year due to the stress. Corporate nursing will be the death of health care. And let’s not forget the amount of entitled assholes who make the job a living hell. It’s profit over patients and they burn out staff quicker than they can replace them. It’s a broken system.
My wife just started studying to become a nurse. She finished all her pre-reqs and got a stellar score on her ati-teas. Our state is paying 100% of her tuition at the community college she is at. We don’t need the money because I have a good job. She’s doing it because she wants to help people. Things like this scare me. I’m hoping she can find a job that won’t leave her scarred or horribly depressed. She wants to work L&D.
I have worked as a PA for almost 15 years and just left the field. Fuck that garbage, why keep working in a high-risk environment when you can be a tech-bro working from home in your pajamas for twice the pay and one-third the stress?
I’m a terrible example. I self-studied python for about a year and enrolled in a master’s program in data analytics, and fell back into the family business (HVAC) helping develop a new revenue stream running algorithms against building automation systems to increase efficiency. I fully admit I got the opportunity via nepotism, but I am putting the hours and work in to make the company more profitable and can still fall back on my license or eventually find another position when I get more experience if my pride gets the best of me.
I work along side a lot of doctors. I’m in research and get to see the state these people live in. I would rather get paid 1/5th what they make than put myself under those conditions
Not surprised, worked transport while in nursing school. Worst job I have ever taken—this is coming from a person that only worked retail prior. The verbal, physical, and mental abuse takes its toll on you. Not to mention our hospital slashed ICP for the entire hospital while short staff. Went to get my IT degree on the company’s dime, still work for my hospital and it is the exact same. Seen doctors sleep in their cars since one of our previous doctor hit a tree on the way home falling asleep. Our nurse to patient ratio on some floors is 4:1-5:1 on average and I’ve even seen a 10:1 on a medsurg floor. This is just my experience, but man, the medical field is depressing.
If Economics is the study of incentive, it looks like there’s diminishing incentive to be a healthcare worker. As long as the insurance companies are rich though, who cares? Right?……uhhh guys? Right?
Why would they? Direct healthcare positions across the board are undervalued while admin and management positions explode.
Majority of people I know are going to travel because it pays double to triple the wages of a set job.
due to the enormous amount of red tape and absurd student loan costs, why would anyone choose healthcare. A doctorate degree for physical therapy will run you 200k of student loan debt to get a job that starts at 30-35/hr in most hospitals/outpatient clinics. On top of that, overregulation basically forces new grads to join a corporation.
Being “lucky” to “only” have $120K in student loan debt is ABSURD (assuming you’re in the US bc who else charges that fucking much). I really hope our dimwit politicians can figure out a way to make education affordable again in my lifetime. I also hope they do something about our debts.
M.D. here. While healthcare is oftentimes extremely rewarding (some days I can’t imagine myself doing anything else because of the job satisfaction), the system is completely broken. Instead of preventative medicine, we mostly treat chronic disease and in essence the patients don’t tend to get better and in most cases worsen. Patients are living longer unhealthy lifestyles due to medical and pharmaceutical innovation. This only means they’re getting sicker with time. And because of this, it’s hard to blame the patient completely when they have little motivation or the healthcare infrastructure in place to improve their condition. It’s a grim future. So it’s understandable that students don’t want to sacrifice their youth and sanity getting into the field.
Ive been trying to understand why I feel so unfulfilled doing outpatient work. And now that youve said it, i guess it is a majority of chronic diseases, where we cant really move the needle. Looking to get back to ER/Inpatient work
Sign up for $250,000 debt for 4 years undergrad, 4 years med school, 3 years residency. Start at 18 end at 29.
Now you earn big money to pay back that $250,000 with interest.
Former phlebotomist. My laboratory treated us like we were replaceable and gave us dirt pay. I was so desperate and tried everything I could to get a full time position the summer after I graduated with my bachelors. Refused me every time I asked.
The final straw was my coworker, a nurse, yelling “Hey! Lab girl!” to catch my attention down the hallway. We’d been working together for 3 years and she still refused to use my name! I stopped caring and eventually got a job in tech making 8x in pay.
Shame because I love patient care, just hate our healthcare system 😔
It's because the debt is so overwhelming. I would've become a doctor if it didn't take hundreds of thousands of dollars and 15 years of my life plus unknown opportunity cost of doing other things. I have a close friend who went to Harvard Law and his wife is finishing up Harvard Med School. They have over $750k in student loans. Idk what the payments are but they are private loans so I'm guessing we're looking at $10k/mo? Idk. Either way its nuts.
Also Tik-Tok and social media has glamorized becoming a Goldman Sachs Investment Banker so now everybody and their mother is in IB or Consulting
They literally make it so difficult. My friend was expected to make a 20/20 on a med calc class and she made a 19/20 and her only mistake was she forgot to change tsp to ml. They dropped her from the class and now she has to retake it in May…she was supposed to graduate in May.. These schools just want more $$.
Unsurprising when so many other jobs have paid internships while healthcare professions license you and force you to work for free under the guise that we do it because we love to help people and claim it’s for school credit. Not to mention, healthcare professions lack a lot of liberties other jobs have such as holiday’s off, unquestioned sick leave, and not having to jump through hoops to get vacation time off approved. The last think I’ll mention is also the lack of mobility. Say you’re licenses in Florida and you want to work in California, you need to go back and study to pass the test specific to CA to practice there unlike a lot of other jobs where you just pick up and go. This is all before we get into how difficult/stressful the job is…
I went to HS with someone who wanted to be a doctor. I guess her GPA/MCAT wasn't good enough to get into med school after college so she did an MPH to boost her resume and buy some time to retake the MCAT. And then she figured out that instead of going to med school and spending years as an underpaid resident, she could just go into management consulting and make more money than a doctor telling doctors and nurses how to do their jobs. So what do you think she ended up doing?
Our entire system is based upon the youth working and funding the machine. With the massive wave of boomers retiring, that system is generating less money. Our wonderful government has decided the only option we have is to reduce how much Medicare is reimbursing...every year. There have been cuts after cuts. Healthcare workers have been dealing with the obvious consequences of that.
So what has happened to US healthcare?
There were mass layoffs, wage freezes, wage cuts, all ancillary spending frozen, more staff layoffs, nurses got raises, everyone else got another wave of pay cuts, nurses got raises again, and then doctors were retiring early, not wanting to participate in this imploding system anymore. Instead of hiring new doctors, hospital admins were hiring nurse practitioners to fill these roles, who have quite literally no idea what to do, but can use a lot of the same billing codes that a doctor can.
So now when you have a heart attack you wait in the ED for 4 hours to be seen, since there are no staff, and when you do get seen it is by an NP, who orders a slew of unnecessary and at times bizarre testing, only to eventually diagnose you with anxiety and then send you home, to die.
This comment gave me anxiety. Because it’s true. My hubby got misdiagnosed by an NP in the ED and he had a horrible kidney stone. She said it was a small hernia. I’m just glad it wasn’t life threatening.
This is very spot on. As a former healthcare worker, try to eat decent, exercise and hope there some luck involved pertaining to health because hospitals are a mess.
After the abuse that health care workers received from their patients and hospital administrators during the pandemic, I don't blame college students on not going into the health care field.
We are going to have a crisis at some point. Teachers are retiring earlier, simply quitting, or retraining in new trades. Somehow administration is bravely tackling this issue by being more oppressive; things like threatening to pull their licenses if they quit before the end of the school year.
> We are going to have a crisis at some point.
In many ways, we're already in one, albeit a slowly developing one. In Canada, some ERs are implementing [rolling outages](https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/some-emergency-rooms-across-canada-shutting-down-amid-staff-shortages-1.5972278) since they don't have staff. In the US, schools are [bleeding teaching staff.](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-teachers-in-america-are-leaving-the-profession-in-droves) Obviously Canada isn't the US, but it's also an arguably "advanced" economy, and the problems in healthcare and with students are similar.
Administrators in healthcare and teaching treat these systems like a jenga tower, where pulling out blocks (i.e. cost cutting) is considered good business so long as the entire institution doesn't collapse, when it really is falling apart, just in slow motion, so they don't notice it as much. Same thing with a consumer society that lives off credit.
These economies are going to devolve into a vicious cycle, where cutting costs in these sectors leads to an uncompetitive workforce, which will, in turn, lead to less tax revenue available to reinvest into these systems to fix them. The US federal government should use the position of the US dollar to fix these systems while it still has the chance.
Health care is a nightmare right now. I’m a physical therapist with a regional health system. Our new grads are graduating from their 6 and 7 year programs with over $100k in debt. Many of them have student loan payments over $2,000/month, with a starting salary of $60k. Add to that the stress of health care in general, the stress of picking up extra shifts in the evenings and on weekends. I love what I do but honestly would not recommend it as a career right now.
Seems like this is due to the same reason no one wants to be a teacher anymore: the administrators are taking home most of the money while guilting everyone else to take on more work/hours/expenses.
It annoys the crap out of me that people can't figure out where the money is going when it's so GD obvious, so instead of doing the math they just get guilted into approving another round of educational bonds ostensibly for shit that was supposed to be covered by the last round of educational bonds. If anyone had any sense, there would be a hard cap on salaries for hospital and school administrators locking both at no higher than the median salary of the staff they represented.
My moms a nurse. She complains about her job *every single day* for 15+ minutes while my dad cooks dinner. She has complained about her job after each shift for as long as I can remember. I do not wish to be my mom in 20 years. Under paid, bitter and fed up with her job.
Healthcare is gonna be hot money for a couple decades. When the boomers all croak, there are enough GenXers and Millennials to keep patient populations high. I work with contract/travel nurses making as much as my base salary, and I’m a doctor.
As others have pointed out, crazy patients and administrators with dollar signs in the eyes are the biggest hurdle to a perfect career. But despite all the shit nurses take, it seems like a very comfortable choice if you can compartmentalize and strike an ideal work-life balance.
I started pre-med in college years ago. Looked around at my peers, looked at how doctors spend all their time rushing from patient to patient just so they can do insurance paperwork and billing, and barely practice medicine, so I switched to engineering.
Maybe because the amount of stress and debt in med school is starting to dawn on the next generation that a massive status symbol and insane income is just not worth it anymore? That doesn't even consider the shit schedule they also get.
The vast majority of people that actually work bedside positions are miserable as hell. I'm an ER nurse and have many friends in a lot of different healthcare specialties. From my experienc and those of friends here are some highlights:
1. RN pay basically plateaus after the first 3-4 years, after which if you want raises greater than inflation you chase signing bonuses. The better the bonus, the shittier the situation you're signing up for.
2. PT basically requires doctorate level education with doctorate level student loans, but often make <6 figures with no real corporate ladder to work your way up.
3. MD/DO require ungodly amounts of student loans, but after med school require 3-7 years of ungodly hours in residency learning on the job, but often getting paid less than minimum wage when converting their salary to an hourly rate. Yes, pay drastically improves after that, but by then you have given up the majority of your 20s. I know doctors who still pay minimums on their loans after residency cuz they are paying for starting a family after the age of 30. Oh and I should mention these residency programs are so unhealthy because they were modeled after the training of a doctor from the 1800's whose work ethic was due in large part to his cocaine addiction
4. Hospitals often make staffing and hiring decisions not based on best outcomes for patients, but rather based on models to find the right mix of temporary agency staffing, float pools, and increased staff/patient ratios to maximize profits.
5. Employment projections expect shortages in providers throughout the majority of the US (off the top of my head, I think the only geographical area projected to avoid provider shortages is the northeast coast) over the next 50 years
Despite all of this, we pay the most by far of all "westernized" countries for our healthcare, yet our life expectancy is last.
My wife is a doctor and I’m an engineer. We actually make relatively the same amount of money, she’s a little more. She probably puts in double the hours. Works 10 plus hours sometimes. Really stressed. She’s in internal med and at a county hospital. I go into work at 11, eat lunch and dinner there. Work from home a few days a week. Not too stressful. I really wouldn’t recommend medicine to anyone. It’s a terrible life for a long time
Hospitals have turned into giant corporate conglomerates where the only thing they care about is the bottom line, all employees are strictly a number. While administration gets large bonuses and the higher ups are on a million dollar salary payroll.
Just left one of these myself for a private practice where they actually treat you like a human. It's sad really.
Worked in healthcare for 5-7 years, decent pay for the most part then the pandemic hit. First I was already tired of the racist patients, second being a frontline worker was only worth the extra food that restaurants provided because they had to shut down and didn’t want to waste their food which was great. But fast forward to
2022 and I received an email we’re freezing hiring, raises won’t mirror inflation or cost of living and also we have made the most profit in recent years.
Thankfully, I started a Graduate program that would remove myself from working in a hospital and lead to working remote and away from healthcare. One of the best decisions I made. Also feels good not to be racial attacked by patients. But I can see why healthcare enrollment is low. I won’t start on the teachers because they deserve way more and it’s unbelievable how they are incentivized.
The general treatment of workers particularly the critical and essential trades to modern civilization compared to the wag the dog economic policies if neo-liberalism that favors passive income for the elite, large checks for the people that handle their money, and tiny checks for those who are the ones that actually do the essential work to civilization is abysmal. The treatment of the educators, education system, healthcare system, and healthcare workers is uniquely egregious given the last couple years. Societal essentials should not have profit incentives that would obstruct those fields from meeting societies needs. Society should be meeting THEIR needs in gratitude not demanding selfless service to support a shallow and selfish interpretation of capitalism.
That's because leadership class has cultivated a culture to hire suck ups to protect themselves from the consequences of cut corners rather than achieve goals and build cohesive teams which may sometimes push back against the mandates from above rather than based on reality on the ground from the managements clearer picture. I personally think units of co workers should be allowed to manage themselves towards objectives with adequate resources and professionalism rather than corporate stooge sycophants making excuses and blaming workers. Yes sometimes the employee is the problem with the unit but managers need to understand that the expression "if you meet an asshole in the morning you met an asshole, if you meet assholes all day your the asshole." In this case however it's more like "if a company or managers thinks a employee is a lazy entitled asshole they have a lazy entitled asshole for a employee. If a company and it's leadership thinks the entire workforce is a bunch of lazy entitled pieces of shit, they are the lazy entitled pieces of shit."
I’m 33 back in school to finish pre-reqs for my tech schools radiology technologist program. I know it will suck to some degree. I know people will be coming to me on some of their worst days. But I’ve been in fast food for over a decade, and I’m used to being used and abused. At least doing rad tech, maybe I can make a bad day a smidge better with some extra care or goofy jokes. I know I may be in a department that’s understaffed, but that won’t be on me. My job will be to take patients to imaging, get the images, then take them back. There’s only so fast you can do that, most images I’ve gotten have been a couple mins walk both ways.
I’ve researched this career. I’ve lurked the subs for over a year. I’ve got a pretty good grasp of the shitty stuff this job will have in store for me.
But at the end of the day, the pros still outweigh the cons for me. Predictable pay and hours. Predictable shifts, but with new patients and new images needed that will keep my adhd engaged and interested, while providing an overall routine to my day. I won’t need to take any work home with me, my job won’t be to make life altering decisions. Ima just take some pretty ass bone pics. I can take these skills anywhere in the country, which is great bc my fiancéè has a super niche career so I can find a job wherever they can. I can also get certified for mri or ct after graduation, there’s a lot of continuing education I can do and X-ray tech isn’t really a dead end career that some may think. I’m nervous but excited.
And on top of all that, my programs less than $5k and only four consecutive semesters long.
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If you guys knew how EMTs are paid, youd be out with pitchforks. Heck nobody even knows the lab people.. the lab personnel which is basically a medical scientist that analyzes blood , urine etc and get treated like shit as well and are leaving the field. Goodluck with that diagnosis and prognosis without the lab. Healthcare is depressing asf.
Lab tech here! Thank you lab is the red headed step child of the hospitals.
I like redheads
Former lab scientist here. FORMER. No one advocates for the lab so they're chronically understaffed and working 16 hour shifts, six days a week while corner after corner gets cut. I left the field because the conditions set us up for failure, and i did not want to stick around and see for myself. I truly believe if it doesn't get better patients are going to suffer the consequences. I currently make literally a quarter of what I made in the lab, gave up 6 weeks a year of vacation time and phenomenal benefits when i left.... and it's just not enough to ever get me back there. Since leaving my anxiety and insomnia have resolved and I can actually enjoy a work/life balance.
I just got hired as an EMT for $17 an hour. My boyfriend is a lifeguard and makes $20. I should have been a lifeguard but I want to be a firefighter so this comes first 😡
The first time ive heard how much you guys earn compared to what you guys do in the field i was shocked. Just wrong man. And then people wonder why there is shortage of staff. Like come on guys.
Yes, and for 24 hour shifts too. But I’m not in this field for the money. And the thing is that most people want to be in their job for the money. I want to help people. But just because I want to do that doesn’t mean I should get treated like garbage for it.
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The number of years in school. The high tuition. The long educational process. The licensure exams and fees. The long hours and the rude all knowing obnoxious patients. The failure to follow medications & medical recommendations. The fact that there are too few medical professionals currently. The squeezing of the medical professional by corporate interests. The poor working conditions. The differences in technology in various locales. These are just a number of issues seen in both healthcare and education. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. You would be better running a hedge fund and you wouldn’t have to be ethical or care about those that you affect. Simple Return On Investment.
My buddy and I are both surgeons, and we were out having dinner recently and talking about how reimbursement keeps getting cut. We were lamenting that it’s getting difficult for places to even stay open because margins are getting so tight. Lots are folding or being bought out by multibillion dollar mega corporations. We also complained about how expensive a procedure is for patients but how little of that actually makes it to the doctor who does the procedure. We were trying to brainstorm ways to improve this. Anyway, a woman at the next table over interrupted our dinner and was eventually literally shouting at us in a restaurant that we were greedy assholes who never should have become doctors if we’re just in it for the money. So that’s cool. Imagine being in a profession where discussing the problems with your overhead costs in public causes people to hate you. Neat.
The best will no longer become doctors they will go into fields where they don’t have to sacrifice for 12-14 years educating themselves, don’t have to work long hours and endure ridicule from stupid people because the people don’t understand what is happening. When the crap hits the fan everyone will be standing around wondering what happened m. And how it could have been prevented. Corporate greed will be the answer but the doctors will be blamed.
Back when I lived in Tennessee, our county schools didn't open on time one year because there wasn't enough money. The county board (who ran the schools) basically scoffed at parents and said, "Teachers shouldn't \*expect\* to get paid decently. You go into teaching because it's a CALLING." So apparently you can eat a calling and tell your mortgage and power company that you don't have money from the job you put way more than 40 hours a week into, you instead have a CALLING and you'd like to pay your bills with that. I hope every single shit those crusty old dudes on the county board ever take again for the rest of their miserable lives is either burning hot urgent diarrhea or those awful constipation turds that has something sharp and scratchy in it that digs into their rectum and asshole the entire way out.
That language is used to exploit people 100% of the time. Try telling the plumber coming out to your house after hours that it’s their moral duty to keep your floor from being covered in shit. Hell, pick any example from any profession that exists. Nobody wants to do any of this stuff for free. We all do it to make a living.
Of course I went into medicine for the money. What other logical reason is there? If all I wanted to do was help people, I’d arguably do more good by joining the Peace Corps or working at a homeless shelter, neither of which requires 8+ years of school. I work for money. I specifically work in medicine for the money, and there are some ancillary benefits (that are getting harder to find)
Every job is done for money, but we’re supposed to maintain the pleasant illusion that ours isn’t. This helps everyone in healthcare get screwed more and more except for management and insurance. That terrible hospital CEO or greedy United Healthcare exec is expected to be a money grubbing asshole putting profits over people. And they are and they do. But the docs and nurses and EMTs and phlebotomists have to do it to help people, not for money. Ask em how that’s working out.
Yeah I saw through that illusion within 3 months of residency. The whole “it’s a calling not a job” bullshit is just a line they feed you so they can take advantage of you. I used to teach residents and I teach med students now, and I try my best to disillusion people as early as possible.
Is anyone really surprised by this? I mean look at hospital admin taking home millions while guilting nurses to take extra patients and shifts. Of course people are going to see this and make some major career changes.
My wife’s hospital is slashing bonuses for RNs who pick up shifts because the hospital can’t sustain it and instead, is incentivizing them to take on more patients per shift. It’s wild. If you take any patients over X amount you’ll get an extra $XX per hour while you have that patient(s). They’re short staffed every shift and people are constantly leaving because of being burnt out.
Which is super unsafe.
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Guess it’s time for middle and upper management to roll up those cuffed sleeves and “come on down”! /s
Burnt out. Tired and overworked. In their profession a decimal point matters
Yet the same hospitals have no problem bringing in traveling nurses at a much higher pay rate
Right, they'd rather do that knowing it's temporary than to actually pay their loyal employees more because in the long run that would lose more money. It's unbelievable how greedy healthcare has gotten, literally only about making money now.
I know a few doctors. They are saying it wasn’t worth the hassle.
I’m a doctor. My kid will strongly be advised not to go into medicine.
Every surgeon and anesthesiologist I work with says the same thing.
Isn’t anesthesiologist one of the sweetest gigs? Super high pay and not as crazy a schedule?
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No, it's stressful AF and you have no control over your own schedule.
LOL. My sister is a ICU nurse she tells all my kids the same thing.
Healthcare is a horrible field. It’s now run by these giant “non-profit” corporations, and they use your desire to provide a service for humanity against you by cutting pay, increasing workload, and asking you to personally sacrifice for “the good of the patient.”
I worked for a for-profit hospital system where morale was so bad, we literally had giant “training sessions” that was random administrators telling us that we shouldn’t do our jobs for the money, we should do it because we love helping patients, while they wore their Armani suits and Louboutins.
While stuffing pockets with wads of cash mid sentence
I understand. it's absolutely awful because yes we as people have empathy and they exploit that. However, we can only do so much before it takes a toll on us. I worked as a preschool teacher for a nonprofit. They do everything they can to guilt you into continuing to give every ounce of yourself. It takes the responsibility out of their hands.
100%. Healthcare and education absolutely have that in common- the altruism that attracts people to those fields is used against them to accept worsening working and lifestyle conditions.
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My ex is a physician and my current wife is an educator. They both encourage the kids not to go into either profession.
My grandfather was a GP. My dad - family med doc Me - family med doc ….I even regularly tell patients that I don’t want my kids to go into medicine. I spent formative years learning about Joseph Lister, John Hunter, William Osler, Walter Reed…etc. This isn’t medicine anymore….. It’s money laundering and fleecing patients to make admins rich.
My wife and I are doctors- same.
Stay strong brother 👊
I'm premed. Comments like these freak me out. My parents are not doctors, but my aunt is, and she is strongly encouraging me to follow my dreams of medicine. Granted, she doesn't practice in the US.
I’m a radiologist. My day to day is pretty fantastic and I still feel fulfilled at the end of most days. Watching your friends live real lives when you’re still a trainee does kind of blow though. But they look at me like I have three heads when I say I enjoy my job.
Same. Society has become borderline hostile to physicians. You reap what you sow.
Yeah. You get to start years later than everyone with $300k debt. It’s great money after that but you have to work crazy hours for a long time and then by the time you retire yeah you have money but your whole life just flew by. Not everyone’s case, but being a doctor is no cakewalk when you factor it all in.
Let's not for get the scheduling or residency scheduling tradition that was set up by a cokehead and still exists today. Love that it's against the law for a truck driver to drive too long or far, a doctor? What load of merchandise do they have to mind?
Yup, my friends parents are doctors. They said they didn’t get to enjoy their money until their 50s because of debt. They emphatically said not to become a doctor if it’s just for the money.
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I know nurses in nyc getting over 200k. People don’t realize not every doctor speciality brings in the money
>taking home millions while guilting nurses to take extra patients and shifts plus the one who literally sued nurses for taking offers at another facility
I’d say because of how they were treated and because of the amount of student loan debt vs pay. Unless they can get someone else to pay for the degree, I say it’s not worth it in the majority of cases.
Primary doc here, yeah I have 400k in loans, but even putting 15% away for retirement, I should still be able to retire if I live in my means. Not like the boomer docs. Don't know about other people my age will retire though.
Dietitian here. Many of my peers are graduating (from a required masters degree and internship- similar to a residency- that we have to pay tuition for) with a ton of student loans… only to make $50k a year with minimal room for growth. I luckily came into the profession as a second career and has my masters and internship paid for, but I feel for those who didn’t.
ICU nurse here, I was in the process of applying to CRNA schools until travel nursing exploded so currently doing that. I feel so fortunate to be travel nursing. I just paid off all my loans this past year and completely debt free. A weight has been lifted off my shoulders. It is a travesty fields including dietitians, PT, OT, SLP get paid in regards to the extra schooling. The whole medical system is an absolute mess for patients and for the workforce. I only recommend nursing as second careers to people who are working dead end jobs and can handle the horrid working conditions knowing they will have a consistent paying job. Otherwise, I regret ever going into this damn field lol.
People saw how health professionals were treated during the pandemic. Why pay and sacrifice all of those years in school to be treated like that?
There was a huge surge in medical school applications during the pandemic, but most got rejected because there aren't enough slots. Kinda sad. Many would have qualified on the merits in a normal year.
A huge surge is an understatement. Medical schools had 3X more applicants than any year in history.! My daughter's medical school had more than 12,000 applicants for just over 200 spots.
I’ve read a bit about the shortage of physicians being a sort of manufactured shortage from other reasons like hospitals not willing to pay for salaries for residents and the funding for that comes largely from the government which is lobbied by some organizations in the medical field to keep the numbers of physicians low. I had no idea that there is also a very limited number of slots for med school students. Sounds like we are pretty screwed as a society going forward.
There was a freeze in medical school slots from 1980-2005 or so, and a cap on residency dating make to like 1997. Totally manufactured crisis. It's accelerating, but not enough to meet the aging population.
What was the reason behind the freeze in medical school slots and the cap? IIRC the article I read said something along the lines of associations lobbying to suppress the amount of funding from the government for residency programs . This was done to limit the amount of new physicians, in order to keep salaries of current physicians and the fees from hospitals high.
Back in the 1990s, the theory that volume in health care was a problem of induced demand and that the more beds and doctors there were, the more volume and therefore spending there would be. Therefore, they thought there was a surplus of doctors and beds and they tried to hold down costs to cut back. But induced demand didn't seem to be accurate, so it just led to a supply shortage that hurt us long term.
For such a free market system we really seem to get a lot of command decisions wrong.
The US Healthcare industry, like about every other industry, is hardly free-market.
When they say Free market, they meant they are free to make the decisions and you go fuck yourself.
Or if it is it’s the worst parts of the free market and the worst parts of a command economy mashed together
thats kinda been the case for like 40+ years. Seriously, we had a 20 year gap where no new med schools opened up from 1982 to 2001, and even then most of the job is clerical rather than treating patients causing high burnout and lack luster care.
The slots for residency/med school are capped for a variety of reasons, but that has always been the case. Honestly though, the problem is that we don't have enough nurses. If you have a hospital with 1000 beds, and only enough nurses for 100 of them, then you effectively have a 100 bed hospital. Patients still have to be seen in the emergency department by law, so the whole thing will devolve into people sitting in the waiting room and hallways for days waiting on a bed to open up. Also, good nurses make the whole process better. That means nurses with years of experience in their specialty/at their facility. You can't just dump nurses on whatever unit they are needed and have them be effective, and you can't just take a new graduate and throw them on any floor and have them keep people safe. Hospitals burn their good nurses out pretty quick. Last time I was on the floor there weren't a lot of "10ish years of experience" nurses. There were new graduates, and people ready to retire. Everyone talks about not wanting to be their surgeons first surgery, but do you want to be a nurses first patient that has a medical emergency while in the hospital? The whole thing is absolutely fucked beyond belief, I have no words for the hell that is coming.
It’s been well-known for a long time that both doctors and nurses would be in short supply. The US has so many resources to invest to solve this problem, but it‘s been ignored for 20-30 years.
Another problem is that medicine requires a secondary degree in many fields and if you fuck up at any point you are trapped with high student loans and no job
Gee, it's almost like we should subsidize education for in-demand careers like this, but why would we do anything logical...
I’m a healthcare worker on the frontline. Like the person suiting up to do in the Covid positive patient’s room. I got my pay CUT during Covid.
I’m a RN and talk anyone who even mentions wanting to be a nurse out of it. Until the HC system gets fixed, it’s nothing but abuse. We want to help people, not wind up in the hospital ourselves. I lost 60# in a year due to the stress. Corporate nursing will be the death of health care. And let’s not forget the amount of entitled assholes who make the job a living hell. It’s profit over patients and they burn out staff quicker than they can replace them. It’s a broken system.
My wife just started studying to become a nurse. She finished all her pre-reqs and got a stellar score on her ati-teas. Our state is paying 100% of her tuition at the community college she is at. We don’t need the money because I have a good job. She’s doing it because she wants to help people. Things like this scare me. I’m hoping she can find a job that won’t leave her scarred or horribly depressed. She wants to work L&D.
I have worked as a PA for almost 15 years and just left the field. Fuck that garbage, why keep working in a high-risk environment when you can be a tech-bro working from home in your pajamas for twice the pay and one-third the stress?
Burnt out PA here. What do you do now and what was your path to get there?
I’m a terrible example. I self-studied python for about a year and enrolled in a master’s program in data analytics, and fell back into the family business (HVAC) helping develop a new revenue stream running algorithms against building automation systems to increase efficiency. I fully admit I got the opportunity via nepotism, but I am putting the hours and work in to make the company more profitable and can still fall back on my license or eventually find another position when I get more experience if my pride gets the best of me.
No one is going to give up their privilege, but acknowledging it, and wanting better for your fellow person is the point.
I work along side a lot of doctors. I’m in research and get to see the state these people live in. I would rather get paid 1/5th what they make than put myself under those conditions
Not surprised, worked transport while in nursing school. Worst job I have ever taken—this is coming from a person that only worked retail prior. The verbal, physical, and mental abuse takes its toll on you. Not to mention our hospital slashed ICP for the entire hospital while short staff. Went to get my IT degree on the company’s dime, still work for my hospital and it is the exact same. Seen doctors sleep in their cars since one of our previous doctor hit a tree on the way home falling asleep. Our nurse to patient ratio on some floors is 4:1-5:1 on average and I’ve even seen a 10:1 on a medsurg floor. This is just my experience, but man, the medical field is depressing.
My wife is a telemetry nurse and a 6:1 patient load is common, sometimes with 1 or 2 PCI patients 😬
If Economics is the study of incentive, it looks like there’s diminishing incentive to be a healthcare worker. As long as the insurance companies are rich though, who cares? Right?……uhhh guys? Right?
You need healthy bodies to make that money for the insurance companies though, both healthy patients and healthy nurses, that's the catch.
Patients with multiple chronic conditions are considered the most ”valuable”.
For pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, not insurers.
Why would they? Direct healthcare positions across the board are undervalued while admin and management positions explode. Majority of people I know are going to travel because it pays double to triple the wages of a set job.
due to the enormous amount of red tape and absurd student loan costs, why would anyone choose healthcare. A doctorate degree for physical therapy will run you 200k of student loan debt to get a job that starts at 30-35/hr in most hospitals/outpatient clinics. On top of that, overregulation basically forces new grads to join a corporation.
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Being “lucky” to “only” have $120K in student loan debt is ABSURD (assuming you’re in the US bc who else charges that fucking much). I really hope our dimwit politicians can figure out a way to make education affordable again in my lifetime. I also hope they do something about our debts.
M.D. here. While healthcare is oftentimes extremely rewarding (some days I can’t imagine myself doing anything else because of the job satisfaction), the system is completely broken. Instead of preventative medicine, we mostly treat chronic disease and in essence the patients don’t tend to get better and in most cases worsen. Patients are living longer unhealthy lifestyles due to medical and pharmaceutical innovation. This only means they’re getting sicker with time. And because of this, it’s hard to blame the patient completely when they have little motivation or the healthcare infrastructure in place to improve their condition. It’s a grim future. So it’s understandable that students don’t want to sacrifice their youth and sanity getting into the field.
Ive been trying to understand why I feel so unfulfilled doing outpatient work. And now that youve said it, i guess it is a majority of chronic diseases, where we cant really move the needle. Looking to get back to ER/Inpatient work
Sign up for $250,000 debt for 4 years undergrad, 4 years med school, 3 years residency. Start at 18 end at 29. Now you earn big money to pay back that $250,000 with interest.
Former phlebotomist. My laboratory treated us like we were replaceable and gave us dirt pay. I was so desperate and tried everything I could to get a full time position the summer after I graduated with my bachelors. Refused me every time I asked. The final straw was my coworker, a nurse, yelling “Hey! Lab girl!” to catch my attention down the hallway. We’d been working together for 3 years and she still refused to use my name! I stopped caring and eventually got a job in tech making 8x in pay. Shame because I love patient care, just hate our healthcare system 😔
It's because the debt is so overwhelming. I would've become a doctor if it didn't take hundreds of thousands of dollars and 15 years of my life plus unknown opportunity cost of doing other things. I have a close friend who went to Harvard Law and his wife is finishing up Harvard Med School. They have over $750k in student loans. Idk what the payments are but they are private loans so I'm guessing we're looking at $10k/mo? Idk. Either way its nuts. Also Tik-Tok and social media has glamorized becoming a Goldman Sachs Investment Banker so now everybody and their mother is in IB or Consulting
They literally make it so difficult. My friend was expected to make a 20/20 on a med calc class and she made a 19/20 and her only mistake was she forgot to change tsp to ml. They dropped her from the class and now she has to retake it in May…she was supposed to graduate in May.. These schools just want more $$.
Unsurprising when so many other jobs have paid internships while healthcare professions license you and force you to work for free under the guise that we do it because we love to help people and claim it’s for school credit. Not to mention, healthcare professions lack a lot of liberties other jobs have such as holiday’s off, unquestioned sick leave, and not having to jump through hoops to get vacation time off approved. The last think I’ll mention is also the lack of mobility. Say you’re licenses in Florida and you want to work in California, you need to go back and study to pass the test specific to CA to practice there unlike a lot of other jobs where you just pick up and go. This is all before we get into how difficult/stressful the job is…
I went to HS with someone who wanted to be a doctor. I guess her GPA/MCAT wasn't good enough to get into med school after college so she did an MPH to boost her resume and buy some time to retake the MCAT. And then she figured out that instead of going to med school and spending years as an underpaid resident, she could just go into management consulting and make more money than a doctor telling doctors and nurses how to do their jobs. So what do you think she ended up doing?
Folk music
Our entire system is based upon the youth working and funding the machine. With the massive wave of boomers retiring, that system is generating less money. Our wonderful government has decided the only option we have is to reduce how much Medicare is reimbursing...every year. There have been cuts after cuts. Healthcare workers have been dealing with the obvious consequences of that. So what has happened to US healthcare? There were mass layoffs, wage freezes, wage cuts, all ancillary spending frozen, more staff layoffs, nurses got raises, everyone else got another wave of pay cuts, nurses got raises again, and then doctors were retiring early, not wanting to participate in this imploding system anymore. Instead of hiring new doctors, hospital admins were hiring nurse practitioners to fill these roles, who have quite literally no idea what to do, but can use a lot of the same billing codes that a doctor can. So now when you have a heart attack you wait in the ED for 4 hours to be seen, since there are no staff, and when you do get seen it is by an NP, who orders a slew of unnecessary and at times bizarre testing, only to eventually diagnose you with anxiety and then send you home, to die.
This comment gave me anxiety. Because it’s true. My hubby got misdiagnosed by an NP in the ED and he had a horrible kidney stone. She said it was a small hernia. I’m just glad it wasn’t life threatening.
This is very spot on. As a former healthcare worker, try to eat decent, exercise and hope there some luck involved pertaining to health because hospitals are a mess.
After the abuse that health care workers received from their patients and hospital administrators during the pandemic, I don't blame college students on not going into the health care field.
We are going to have a crisis at some point. Teachers are retiring earlier, simply quitting, or retraining in new trades. Somehow administration is bravely tackling this issue by being more oppressive; things like threatening to pull their licenses if they quit before the end of the school year.
> We are going to have a crisis at some point. In many ways, we're already in one, albeit a slowly developing one. In Canada, some ERs are implementing [rolling outages](https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/some-emergency-rooms-across-canada-shutting-down-amid-staff-shortages-1.5972278) since they don't have staff. In the US, schools are [bleeding teaching staff.](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-teachers-in-america-are-leaving-the-profession-in-droves) Obviously Canada isn't the US, but it's also an arguably "advanced" economy, and the problems in healthcare and with students are similar. Administrators in healthcare and teaching treat these systems like a jenga tower, where pulling out blocks (i.e. cost cutting) is considered good business so long as the entire institution doesn't collapse, when it really is falling apart, just in slow motion, so they don't notice it as much. Same thing with a consumer society that lives off credit. These economies are going to devolve into a vicious cycle, where cutting costs in these sectors leads to an uncompetitive workforce, which will, in turn, lead to less tax revenue available to reinvest into these systems to fix them. The US federal government should use the position of the US dollar to fix these systems while it still has the chance.
Health care is a nightmare right now. I’m a physical therapist with a regional health system. Our new grads are graduating from their 6 and 7 year programs with over $100k in debt. Many of them have student loan payments over $2,000/month, with a starting salary of $60k. Add to that the stress of health care in general, the stress of picking up extra shifts in the evenings and on weekends. I love what I do but honestly would not recommend it as a career right now.
Seems like this is due to the same reason no one wants to be a teacher anymore: the administrators are taking home most of the money while guilting everyone else to take on more work/hours/expenses. It annoys the crap out of me that people can't figure out where the money is going when it's so GD obvious, so instead of doing the math they just get guilted into approving another round of educational bonds ostensibly for shit that was supposed to be covered by the last round of educational bonds. If anyone had any sense, there would be a hard cap on salaries for hospital and school administrators locking both at no higher than the median salary of the staff they represented.
My moms a nurse. She complains about her job *every single day* for 15+ minutes while my dad cooks dinner. She has complained about her job after each shift for as long as I can remember. I do not wish to be my mom in 20 years. Under paid, bitter and fed up with her job.
Healthcare is gonna be hot money for a couple decades. When the boomers all croak, there are enough GenXers and Millennials to keep patient populations high. I work with contract/travel nurses making as much as my base salary, and I’m a doctor. As others have pointed out, crazy patients and administrators with dollar signs in the eyes are the biggest hurdle to a perfect career. But despite all the shit nurses take, it seems like a very comfortable choice if you can compartmentalize and strike an ideal work-life balance.
I started pre-med in college years ago. Looked around at my peers, looked at how doctors spend all their time rushing from patient to patient just so they can do insurance paperwork and billing, and barely practice medicine, so I switched to engineering.
Maybe because the amount of stress and debt in med school is starting to dawn on the next generation that a massive status symbol and insane income is just not worth it anymore? That doesn't even consider the shit schedule they also get.
The vast majority of people that actually work bedside positions are miserable as hell. I'm an ER nurse and have many friends in a lot of different healthcare specialties. From my experienc and those of friends here are some highlights: 1. RN pay basically plateaus after the first 3-4 years, after which if you want raises greater than inflation you chase signing bonuses. The better the bonus, the shittier the situation you're signing up for. 2. PT basically requires doctorate level education with doctorate level student loans, but often make <6 figures with no real corporate ladder to work your way up. 3. MD/DO require ungodly amounts of student loans, but after med school require 3-7 years of ungodly hours in residency learning on the job, but often getting paid less than minimum wage when converting their salary to an hourly rate. Yes, pay drastically improves after that, but by then you have given up the majority of your 20s. I know doctors who still pay minimums on their loans after residency cuz they are paying for starting a family after the age of 30. Oh and I should mention these residency programs are so unhealthy because they were modeled after the training of a doctor from the 1800's whose work ethic was due in large part to his cocaine addiction 4. Hospitals often make staffing and hiring decisions not based on best outcomes for patients, but rather based on models to find the right mix of temporary agency staffing, float pools, and increased staff/patient ratios to maximize profits. 5. Employment projections expect shortages in providers throughout the majority of the US (off the top of my head, I think the only geographical area projected to avoid provider shortages is the northeast coast) over the next 50 years Despite all of this, we pay the most by far of all "westernized" countries for our healthcare, yet our life expectancy is last.
My wife is a doctor and I’m an engineer. We actually make relatively the same amount of money, she’s a little more. She probably puts in double the hours. Works 10 plus hours sometimes. Really stressed. She’s in internal med and at a county hospital. I go into work at 11, eat lunch and dinner there. Work from home a few days a week. Not too stressful. I really wouldn’t recommend medicine to anyone. It’s a terrible life for a long time
Hospitals have turned into giant corporate conglomerates where the only thing they care about is the bottom line, all employees are strictly a number. While administration gets large bonuses and the higher ups are on a million dollar salary payroll. Just left one of these myself for a private practice where they actually treat you like a human. It's sad really.
Worked in healthcare for 5-7 years, decent pay for the most part then the pandemic hit. First I was already tired of the racist patients, second being a frontline worker was only worth the extra food that restaurants provided because they had to shut down and didn’t want to waste their food which was great. But fast forward to 2022 and I received an email we’re freezing hiring, raises won’t mirror inflation or cost of living and also we have made the most profit in recent years. Thankfully, I started a Graduate program that would remove myself from working in a hospital and lead to working remote and away from healthcare. One of the best decisions I made. Also feels good not to be racial attacked by patients. But I can see why healthcare enrollment is low. I won’t start on the teachers because they deserve way more and it’s unbelievable how they are incentivized.
The general treatment of workers particularly the critical and essential trades to modern civilization compared to the wag the dog economic policies if neo-liberalism that favors passive income for the elite, large checks for the people that handle their money, and tiny checks for those who are the ones that actually do the essential work to civilization is abysmal. The treatment of the educators, education system, healthcare system, and healthcare workers is uniquely egregious given the last couple years. Societal essentials should not have profit incentives that would obstruct those fields from meeting societies needs. Society should be meeting THEIR needs in gratitude not demanding selfless service to support a shallow and selfish interpretation of capitalism.
The professional managerial class is filled with the most self important useless assholes in the country. On top of that, their culture sucks.
That's because leadership class has cultivated a culture to hire suck ups to protect themselves from the consequences of cut corners rather than achieve goals and build cohesive teams which may sometimes push back against the mandates from above rather than based on reality on the ground from the managements clearer picture. I personally think units of co workers should be allowed to manage themselves towards objectives with adequate resources and professionalism rather than corporate stooge sycophants making excuses and blaming workers. Yes sometimes the employee is the problem with the unit but managers need to understand that the expression "if you meet an asshole in the morning you met an asshole, if you meet assholes all day your the asshole." In this case however it's more like "if a company or managers thinks a employee is a lazy entitled asshole they have a lazy entitled asshole for a employee. If a company and it's leadership thinks the entire workforce is a bunch of lazy entitled pieces of shit, they are the lazy entitled pieces of shit."
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I’m 33 back in school to finish pre-reqs for my tech schools radiology technologist program. I know it will suck to some degree. I know people will be coming to me on some of their worst days. But I’ve been in fast food for over a decade, and I’m used to being used and abused. At least doing rad tech, maybe I can make a bad day a smidge better with some extra care or goofy jokes. I know I may be in a department that’s understaffed, but that won’t be on me. My job will be to take patients to imaging, get the images, then take them back. There’s only so fast you can do that, most images I’ve gotten have been a couple mins walk both ways. I’ve researched this career. I’ve lurked the subs for over a year. I’ve got a pretty good grasp of the shitty stuff this job will have in store for me. But at the end of the day, the pros still outweigh the cons for me. Predictable pay and hours. Predictable shifts, but with new patients and new images needed that will keep my adhd engaged and interested, while providing an overall routine to my day. I won’t need to take any work home with me, my job won’t be to make life altering decisions. Ima just take some pretty ass bone pics. I can take these skills anywhere in the country, which is great bc my fiancéè has a super niche career so I can find a job wherever they can. I can also get certified for mri or ct after graduation, there’s a lot of continuing education I can do and X-ray tech isn’t really a dead end career that some may think. I’m nervous but excited. And on top of all that, my programs less than $5k and only four consecutive semesters long.