The Daily Telegraph has an article defending the idea that general practitioners can and sometimes do out-earn the banking business. Of course, people have not traditionally gone into the medical field looking to make millions, although some innovators of medical patents, for instance, may have done just that. Generally speaking, I take the view that so long as doctors are operating in a free market, then what they receive is a matter of indifference to me. Good luck to those who do well, I say. If we had a genuine market in healthcare, then the high salaries paid to the best doctors would, in time, attract bright people to become doctors rather than say, derivatives traders, or whatever.
Of course, this is not the present situation. With many doctors, their pay is partly driven by their membership of a restricted profession and in the case of the UK, by the money spent by the taxpayer. And as for bankers, or at least some of them, they too benefit from the privileged access to central banking funding of their employers, from bailouts, from barriers to entry erected by regulators, and so on. So if people in Wall Street and the City do get sniffy about how much the men and women in white coats sometimes get paid, remember, they are not quite operating in a free market world, either.
As far as I see it, the job of most General Practitioners is basically to fix scratches, prescribe drugs, and act as gatekeepers controlling access to more skilled doctors. A lot of the time, what they are basically doing is rent seeking rather than anything useful. This is precisely because they are members of a closed shop that is protected by the government.
A good GP is able to spot when a patient has something serious which needs urgent treatment. I owe my life to one such GP who had the sense and skill to see that what appeared to be a minor infection was in fact likely to be something potentially life-threatening. Had he not done so I would have been dead within the month.
The same GP also provided invaluable advice (far better than from the inexperienced midwife) when I was struggling to feed my newborn son.
For that I will put up with any amount of doctors checking up on scratches and other minor matters. It’s because they see the ordinary and routine that they are – or should be – able to spot the non-routine and dangerous.
I’ve never had a problem with doctors being well paid. I’d sure as hell pay them a fair whack if I needed to see one badly enough. And a mate of mine is married to a doctor of 10 years experience working in one of Britain’s top cancer hospitals, and she is paid a pittance considering the hours she has to put in.