How much are doctors worth: how much do doctors really earn?

“How long is a piece of string?” goes the old saying; how do you determine the value of anything? There's the old cliché about supply and demand; there's also the old marxian notion about the social determination of the “value” of money and commodities. And there is of course the time honoured labour theory of value.

So, how do you determine value? For example, how valuable is education? Most people would say that a good education is very valuable—then, how is that teachers are so poorly paid if what they do is so valuable? Most people would agree that good medical care is very valuable—so why the fuss about doctors being paid well, why the endless scrutiny? Why do we not see the same preoccupation with pay for lawyers and businessmen?

With education and health, we speak about value to society. In the case of business, accountancy, and law, value refers to how much profit can be generated. Those who provide socially valuable services—such as nurses, teachers, firemen and doctors—are expected to be “dedicated” rather than interested in money; therefore their claims to better remuneration are taken as rather distasteful since their goal is supposed to be to provide a service and perform a “duty.” Coupled with that, at least in the case of doctors, is a traditional notion that “doctors are rich.”

Some doctors are rich, and relative to other equivalent professions, doctors might once have been comfortable. It is no longer true that in general doctors are rich. But doctors are important, and there has been a campaign in recent years to render them unimportant, disempower them, and control them. I know of no doctor who gets a multi-million pound sign-on bonus, nor any who after being struck off might walk away with a multi-million pound severance package. Yet these practices are common in the upper echelons of industry among heads of companies.

This debate is full of ideologically determined straw men. It should be clear that no one has had an honest discussion about value or values. The same people who have the knives out for doctors' earnings are rolling out the proverbial red carpet for those in the finance sector. This should tell us all what values are considered more important. It does not seem to cross too many pundits' minds that these values are utterly distorted.

The same honesty should apply to discussions about others who provide essential, valuable services to our society. Perhaps if doctors, firemen, nurses, teachers, and cleaners withdrew their services for a while, their value might be appreciated.