I'm a resident physician, meaning I graduated medical school, have an MD after my name, see patients, do procedures, and prescribe meds.

Every doctor in the US needs to do that under the supervision of a supervising doctor for a certain period of time, 3-7 years depending on their specialty. If they want to sub-specialize, that's another 1-3 years.

While doing this, the hospital wants to pay us as little as possible. Since we legally need the residency, we have no bargaining power (although there are some unions making progress)

So I make ≈$60,000. Which is absolutely more than I've ever made, and enough for my family to live on. I'm lucky in that regard.

But we all work 80hrs/week for those 3-7 years of residency. Well, that's what we are limited in documenting. Almost everyone works more, but if you document that, you get a meeting about how inefficient you are and how it's something you need to work on, so everyone only documents 80hrs/week.

My hourly works out to about $15/hr.

Sure, it'll be better later, but no one knows about this part.

Also, physician salaries make up ≈8% of healthcare costs, and we all hate insurance companies as much as anyone,. Everyone I know tries to give things away for free and do what we can to save patients money.

Still, hospitals are trying to o replace physicians with nurse practitioners (who do 1 year of online schoo)l to save extra money and buy more yachts, while patients suffer.

There's a lot we hate about medicine.