If doctors think they should be paid more because they are saving lives, they should remember that bus drivers and airline pilots are solely responsible for hundreds of lives every day, and they rarely crack six figures either.
The only difference between violinists and pilots and doctors, and the reason why doctors make more money, is just artificial scarcity. Doctors have deliberately made it as hard as possible to become a doctor, thus artificially depleting the labor supply.
Again the skill level required of someone to drive a bus, or pilot a plane (similar to my profession actually) is much different than that of a physician. Your referencing of pilots brings up a really important point, that most do not actually save lives in a true emergency. I can name only 2 pilots who have successfully landed planes in dire emergencies in the past few years, the vast majority go on to perish with their plane full of passengers. As far as bus drivers, again we are talking about a skill set that in essence is learned by teenagers. It is not a valid comparison.
Talk to any physician in a teaching facility and they will tell you not about the lack of spaces for qualified applicants, but the lack of fellowships being filled by qualified applicants. I work with residents and frequently baby sit them. It does not fill me with hope that I as a non physician get to teach them a ton of things they should have learned way earlier in their medical career. Lowering the bar is not the answer.
Experienced pilots make ~150k a year.
99% of surgeons also lake the dexterity and precision to perform as a concert pianist, too, yet we don't pay them a half mil per year no matter how good they are.
A bad concert performance in and of itself never killed anyone. You're trying to equate the value of human life with entertainment. By the way, popular entertainers make many times more than physicians.
You are free to pay any price to anyone of your choosing, that has nothing to do with the artificial requirements that everyone ELSE should also pay so much. You are interfering in the free market if you believe that your decisions should be forced on all other patients.
Are you really stating that little old me, anonymous internet poster, is actually actively interfering with the free market? That's hyperbole if I ever heard it.
When my DD's surgeon comes out of the OR and tells me that he spent 3 hours (of what he predicted would take 90 minutes or less) staring through a microscope scraping shit off a tiny fucking membrane (the only thing keeping my DD from having her inner ear punctured and suffering life long vertigo), I'm thankful that there are people out there who are talented and hard working to keep at it. Because I can tell you, I've seen the stamina of these people first hand and I don't have it. I doubt anyone who hasn't been there witnessing what doctors do could have even a basic idea of the difference in drive and work ethic that a skilled physician has and the absolute shit show of someone who lacks either the knowledge, skill seat, or drive. People die over this sort of thing, every goddamn day. You want the dr who sees this stuff and performs the test or procedure 200x a year, not 15x a year. The person who forgoes a personal life because they are married to medicine.
I have 11 years of post-secondary education, plus required on-the-job training akin to a residency. I graduated from the number one and number two programs in the country in my specialty, and went to work for the premier employer for people with my PhD. I completed my career and then retired without every making more than six figures. I thought I was overpaid for my work, because there were guys in my office who worked twice as hard as me for half the money. My education and background "justified" my salary only in the eyes of the people writing my checks, but they did not accurately reflect the amount of work that I did compared to other people in my office.
You are sorely mistaken if you think most Drs are making 7 figures. Family practice medicine makes ~200k, anesthesia ~300k, ER medicine 300-400k, cardiology and other skilled specialties like neurosurgery ~600k. Some is high. I don't disagree with that. Based off your previous statements however, you agree to some extent as you stated that most physicians don't require dexterity to perform complex procedures. Just because a specialty doesn't state surgeon in their name does not mean they never perform procedures.
Perhaps you should have worked harder.
We don't. They are also overpaid. You cannot justify one overpaid profession (doctors) by pointing to another (tech managers) as if murder is okay because other people are also being murdered. At least tech managers can justify their salaries by the incredible profits they generate for their employers, unlike doctors. If tech companies weren't so flush with cash,they wouldn't pay such high salaries.
You just did what you said you don't do.
Every med student I've ever met has delusions of grandeur, as if their medical degree confers some sort of special social status and makes them better than the rest of us. My doctor is not smarter than me. He does not work harder than me. He is not responsible for more profits than me, or helping more people than me. Why does he make so much more than me?
Because your dr doesn't sit around on this forum during his work hours, complaining about how stupid his job is and how he's reached the top of the pay scale and how there's just no incentive for him to work harder so he's going to slack off until his retirement. Sound familiar? Do you expect others to work super hard without appropriate compensation when you spent months on this forum bitching about the federal govt not allowing you advancement opportunities? Now pretend you were caring for 40 patients a day, juggling their medical histories, writing prescriptions and referrals, performing in office procedures. Then you get to go home, be on call, maybe log into your EMR at home and review images, order some urgent tests, and wow get paged into the hospital for a consult at 3 am. You're there til 6 am, you change clothes in your office, then you have another full day of doing the same shit. Maybe you're on call again, maybe you're not. Maybe the only call you get that night is that Mr Jones can't poop and he ran out of his shit medicine and can you please call him in a script because his wife (or the unit nurse) is going to nag you to death on the phone if you don't. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Now it's the weekend. You're not on call for new patients, but the on call guy does a shit job of seeing your inpatients, so you go in on Saturday and Sunday to round on them, but hell its only 3 hours each day.
So yeah, whatever you did in your office with your 11 years of training (comparable to many physician specialities btw) probably does not compare at all to the shit that a lot of docs put up with day in and day out. The lack of sleep and a predictable schedule in and of itself is a huge factor in pay. While lower paid hourly people are paid each and every time they go back to work, most physicians are salaried and their 60 hour weeks do not earn them any call pay (20- 50% pay for hourly workers), overtime or call back pay (1.5 - 2x pay), night, holiday or weekend differential (again often 1.5 - 2x pay).