You’re paid for residency and fellowship, but it’s less than minimum wage.

There’s nothing wrong with becoming a doctor for the money. Additionally, if doctors are middle class who should be upper class? If not doctors then who? If we don’t pay doctors to sacrifice 14 years of their life then we won’t have any doctors. The US has tons of lucrative fields that pay well (especially when compared to Europe). Why go through that trouble if you can make as much in an easier STEM major that doesn’t require the workload?

As forcreimbursements, right now our socialized medicine (Medicare and Medicaid) basically lose money for doctors. It’s literally a loss if they see a Medicaid patient and Medicare breaks even. The reimbursements are so poor that doctors associated with hospitals are required to see a certain percentage of Medicaid/Medicare patients. Otherwise, those people would never get healthcare because a doctor would just see folks with private insurance.

If medicine is socialized nationally, the government would drop those reimbursements even lower since there’s less competition. This means doctors either take a huge pay cut (and lay off a ton of staff like nurses) or work even longer hours to make up for it.

Doctors already are at a 60% or higher dissatisfaction with their compensation work-life balance. If we push them further they’ll just start to drop out and our already bad physician shortage will only get worse.