Are physician salaries in Canada a bubble that is waiting to pop?

[csmajor]

Perspective from a cs major:

I'm in my 4th year interning at a FAANG like startup (Stripe) right now and I'm making 110k usd prorated. Here's a glimpse at some of our intern salaries: https://www.levels.fyi/internships/. New grad I'll make 300k usd (270 cad if I work from Canada) at the age of 23. Most of the Canadian talent will be in America so looking at Canadian salaries can skew your perception. Honestly I feel like I worked less harder than the average kid who get's into med school. I go to a regular school (not McGill, UofT, Waterloo, UBC) I've pretty much just ignored school and focus on passing interviews, my gpa was 2.0/4.0 at one point and I still got interviews from Google. With all the time y'all spend on extracurriculars, gpa, volunteering, research you'd def make it big in cs. As an intern I work ~ 40 hours a week, have full flexibility to work from office or remotely, free breakfast and lunch, many wfh and health and wellness stipends, free work laptops etcs. I don't think wlb balances changes that much full time expect I'd have to do oncalls prob once a month.

[offmychestplease]

1 hour ago, csmajor said:

Perspective from a cs major:

I'm in my 4th year interning at a FAANG like startup (Stripe) right now and I'm making 110k usd prorated. Here's a glimpse at some of our intern salaries: https://www.levels.fyi/internships/. New grad I'll make 300k usd (270 cad if I work from Canada) at the age of 23. Most of the Canadian talent will be in America so looking at Canadian salaries can skew your perception. Honestly I feel like I worked less harder than the average kid who get's into med school. I go to a regular school (not McGill, UofT, Waterloo, UBC) I've pretty much just ignored school and focus on passing interviews, my gpa was 2.0/4.0 at one point and I still got interviews from Google. With all the time y'all spend on extracurriculars, gpa, volunteering, research you'd def make it big in cs. As an intern I work ~ 40 hours a week, have full flexibility to work from office or remotely, free breakfast and lunch, many wfh and health and wellness stipends, free work laptops etcs. I don't think wlb balances changes that much full time expect I'd have to do oncalls prob once a month.

lol

[csmajor]

Yeah

4 minutes ago, offmychestplease said:

and? People in CS spend their time 24/7 on social media and any site they can get to brag about their income...I guess the insecurity comes from the fact they forget their job entails them sitting behind a computer desk working on boring code and answering emails lmao 

Yeah I am insecure, that's prob the main reason I commented lmao. I do think it's good to educate people on how it is in tech though, just tryna say it's true and set the point straight.

[ChemPetE]

16 hours ago, csmajor said:

Perspective from a cs major:

I'm in my 4th year interning at a FAANG like startup (Stripe) right now and I'm making 110k usd prorated. Here's a glimpse at some of our intern salaries: https://www.levels.fyi/internships/. New grad I'll make 300k usd (270 cad if I work from Canada) at the age of 23. Most of the Canadian talent will be in America so looking at Canadian salaries can skew your perception. Honestly I feel like I worked less harder than the average kid who get's into med school. I go to a regular school (not McGill, UofT, Waterloo, UBC) I've pretty much just ignored school and focus on passing interviews, my gpa was 2.0/4.0 at one point and I still got interviews from Google. With all the time y'all spend on extracurriculars, gpa, volunteering, research you'd def make it big in cs. As an intern I work ~ 40 hours a week, have full flexibility to work from office or remotely, free breakfast and lunch, many wfh and health and wellness stipends, free work laptops etcs. I don't think wlb balances changes that much full time expect I'd have to do oncalls prob once a month.

Happy for you and thanks for sharing your perspective. Definitely tech has it good right now. As they say, a rising tide floats all boats

[Galaxsci]

The tech grad is right on. In real terms (aka factoring in inflation), physician salaries have decreased over the past 20 years. In Ontario, family docs were making ~250k in the late 90s. Over 20 years later, they're making 300-350k. Most people working in the private sector, especially in tech, have seen substantially higher wage growth rates than physicians over the past 20 years.

[1D7]

On 9/14/2021 at 11:33 PM, zoxy said:

Additionally as someone mentioned above, NPs are popular in the US because they INCREASE healthcare spending. They might earn less than the equivalent physician, but their inferior diagnosis skills result in more testing and referrals to specialists, which in turn increases overall healthcare spending. While this is a desired outcome in the US system, I can't see provincial governments being OK with this. So inaction on the part of Canadian MDs is not a case of Canadian doctors being clueless. It's rather a case of Canada having substantially different healthcare dynamics than the US.

Now I'm not saying physician pay will necessarily remain stable/increase in Canada. Rather that NPs will not lead to a decline. A rise in interest rates would put serious strain on government coffers and cuts in healthcare spending would be unavoidable in such a scenario.

 

I would be careful with this.

Provincial healthcare aren't bastions of efficiency and politics plays as large, if not a larger role in determining things like pay. The reality is that nurses run circles around physicians when it comes to public political theatre.

So while Canadian physicians are protected to some degree for the reasons you mention, the very same issues facing the States can still creep up here. A foothold has already been established in BC where family docs are receiving less money per patient as compared to a NP, while delivering care with superior experience.

[zoxy]

On 2/4/2022 at 4:42 PM, 1D7 said:

A foothold has already been established in BC where family docs are receiving less money per patient as compared to a NP, while delivering care with superior experience.

I think your penultimate point will ultimately win the day. Sure, a foothold has been established in BC but as you say, it's costing the government more money per patient. While you can sway politicians for footholds, a much larger proliferation of NPs, a la the US, would require far more funding and would not be attempted. As for the superiority of experience, put me on salary with a pension and I'll spend three hours with each patient. 

I agree that nurse unions are powerful, but I think their treatment in Ontario and Quebec shows that governments do not want to pay them, and that there are limits to power of the nursing unions. I personally think that the NP experiment in BC confirms that NPs are not the way forward for penny pinching governments.

The only problem in BC is that the Health Minister, Adrian Dix, is too foolhardy and obstinate to admit this and change course. If you're familiar with BC politics, you'll know him as the man who lost an election that was deemed unlosable in 2013. The media said he'd win even if he kicked a dog. Dix proceeded to get obliterated without kicking a dog, he's just a specialist in failure.