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This is no longer the case (your citation is from 1965) and is a non-sequitur anyway.
If you cut doctor salaries in half and double the number of doctors, you have improved physician lifestyle at the expense of compensation but not changed costs at all.
This is only true if you also cut the hours doctors work.
If you were working 24 hour shifts, weekends, and holidays - and then someone decided to cut your pay in half. Would you keep working period? Probably not. Would you entertain those hours? Zero chance.
Nurses typically work 3 12s or 4 10s and in some cases make six figures and we already have a nursing shortage problem because they don't like the schedule (because clinical work can suck and nights, weekends, and holidays also suck).
I wouldnt work 24 hour shifts in the first place, and I'd be pissed if I found out that a doctor who was seeing me and potentially making huge decisions or recommendations about my health was 23 hours into a shift.
Anyways, average seems to be somewhere in the 50s of hours per week. Increasing the amount of doctors such that they no longer have to work stupid hours seems like a no brainer, I would easily take a ~30% pay cut to go from 55 hours to 40 and not have 24 hour shifts. No idea why doctors wouldnt either.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1385440/physicians-work-hours-united-states/
Attending physician work life definitely lands more in the 40-60 range "on average." Surgical specalities can still end up in the 60-80 hour range as an adult.
As a resident 60-80 is more common with 80 being the "max" allowed but many places go over that. Neurosurgeons may end up working 100-120 hour weeks more often than not for like seven fucking years.
The devil is in the details though. Most medical jobs require someone to cover weekends, nights, and holidays. How that shakes out is pretty variable but you can be an attending with a relatively normal 60 hour work week.....but a few times a month you work 24s. Maybe you do trauma at a midsized trauma center. If it's Tuesday you actually sleep through the night. If it's Friday you are working 24 hours in a row. That is ass at age 27. At age 55 it is catastrophic.
Um.....about that.
If you go to a university hospital (you should if you have the choice) you WILL be cared for by a resident who hasn't slept in a day. If you get a surgery done the person operating on you might be on hour 28 and gotten 4 hours of sleep the night before that long ass shift.
Edit: these days theres a good number of women in medicine who decide to work part time for a pay cut. It is a thing but given how time consuming and expensive it is to train someone it's usually unwise.
I'm from the UK, where a typical long shift for a doctor is 13 hours, so I cant really tell if this is an exaggeration.
But if this is true, holy shit. That is absolutely outrageous. how can you with a straight face protest that doctors are so desperately committed patient wellbeing, while accepting a 28 hour long surgery shift? There's no other way to describe it - that's dangerous. You, above all, should know what the science tells us about decreasing performance with fatigue. Any airline pilot that accepted a shift even close to that would lose their license.
Sometimes there's just no other option. An airline can simply delay the flight until a new pilot is available, but you can't always delay a surgery like that, and there might not be any other surgeons available. We have a massive shortage of doctors because of the dumb med school/residency system.
Of course there is another option - you don't put yourself in that position in the first place. you don't bite off more than you can chew, as an institution. and if you fuck up and end up overbooked, then you take the hard choice and start cancelling surgeries. There might not be another airline pilot available, you think that excuse would fly when a pilot crashes an airliner into a mountain because he was exhausted? of course not. So why should it fly when an exhausted surgeon perforates a bowel or misreads a chart?
GP's point is that air travel is not analogous to surgery because nobody ever dies from not being able to catch a certain flight (Saigon and Kabul aside).
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