Sunday, March 14, 2010

Nurses earn more money than doctors?

I recently saw an article on Yahoo with the headline of nurses being paid more than doctors. The title is misleading, the actual article goes on to explain that Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNA) make more money than family medicine doctors. It's a poor comparison, CRNAs have an extensive (and expensive) education and do not represent the earning potential of regular nurses. Family medicine physicians are the lowest paid doctors and do a year less residency than other MDs. Let's see a better comparison:


Salary data for Surgeon, Family Medicine, and RN come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the CRNA Yahoo article quoted above. I note that the BLS reported a lower figure for family medicine than the article. I also note that physicians are paid during their residency while the CRNA is free labour during their MSN.

I am, in no way, denigrating the family medicine physicians. They are in short supply, not because of the lack of demand but the lack of interest by many medical students to enter the field. Prestige and additional money await specialists and bright students are encouraged to actively avoid the role of primary care medicine. High office overhead with an ever-increasing bureaucratic maze created by private insurance companies makes primary care less attractive as well.

I also suspect gender has a lot to do with this issue. Women now outnumber men in medical schools while men are entering nursing in larger numbers. Any field that is dominated by women has traditionally been poorly compensated. Doctors in Soviet Russia had little prestige and were very poorly paid. In all specialities except surgery. It is no surprise that the ranks of physicians were mostly filled with women except for surgery - almost entirely male. I see more and more of a slide in the salaries of Western doctors in the future. I also see continued improvement in the remuneration of nurses as more and more men enter the field.

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