Can anyone explain it to me like I’m 5? What is the controversy?
in the medical field you have sort of two opposing forces:
there’s a severe lack of personnel, because personnel is very hard to train, and its not practical for doctors to train a bunch of people simultaneously.
Governments want them to train more, but the consequence of training more is you get sloppier work, and all the doctors pay will decrease because theyd essentially be training their competition/replacements.
Given the fact that the medical field is one of the hardest fields to enter (and one of the costliest ones), existing doctors have much more to lose if there is a flood of new workers. Doctors on a reletive scale are overworked and underpaid, and adding more staff would address the overworked part, but doesn’t fixed the underpaid part. Given that South Korea has a socialized health care, it’s virtually a matter of the government willing to pay more for doctors or not
edit: I should preface, by underpaid, its not how much they get paid once they finish all their trianing (which is a lot, almost 4x the average). it’s just that while doctors are going through the intern status, they get paid peanuts(basically country average) while working (an illegal) amount of time, so the journey up to becoming a full fledged doctor is basically work slavery. It’s in a very similar boat to like trade school apprenticeship (where you start off with destitute pay) but gradually gets better and you get options for more hours. the only difference is doctors have that mandatory almost decade year of training while trade jobs start work almost instantly.
There are a lot of problems in the Korean medical system. Here’s a journal report discussing a few of the key points: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00766-9/fulltext
Here’s a longer article going into detail why the residents are so upset.
Basically, there are a lot of problems with the South Korean healthcare system, leading to unsafe public health situations. Instead of actually trying to fix any of the problems, the government decided to significantly increase the number of residents each year (throw more people at the problems), criminally prosecute them for mistakes, and also tell them it might be illegal to quit, so they’ll just take their whole medical license away. Like 90% quit and said they’re not coming back. There was a suggestion that the government, instead of completely revoking resigning residents’ medical licenses, may remove their ability to work in hospitals ever again, but allow them to work in rural clinics because they’re already so understaffed and no one wants to live in the middle of nowhere for shit pay… unless the only other option is to find a new field of work and waste all those years of med school.
*Edited to add more context
Doctors wrote these articles to try to justify the strikes beyond the real reason.
What triggered the strikes were the opening of more positions in healthcare thus possibly effecting doctors’ bottom lines.
Edit: I’m also having trouble finding any sources that say “like 90%” of residents quit.
From one of the cited articles in the study:
Despite the government’s continued conciliation, the return of majors is still a long way off. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, only 879 (8.4%) of the 10,509 residents of 211 training hospitals actually went to work as of the 30th of last month. Based on 100 training hospitals, only 714 out of 9,992 people (7.1%) are working. “The Ministry of Health and Welfare recently sent an official letter to the heads of training hospitals across the country to meet with doctors to confirm their intention to return to the hospital and their future career,” said Jeon, a controller. “If you look at the institutions that submitted related data, the response rate for returning majors is less than 10 percent.”
Basically, the med schools want to bring in more students which will, in turn, create more doctors. Existing doctors see this as competition and a threat to their livelihood. They are already well paid in Korea, so it’s just the doctors being greedy. What country wouldn’t want more medical professionals?
Existing doctors see this as competition and a threat to their livelihood. They are already well paid in Korea, so it’s just the doctors being greedy.
None of this is true.
One of the plans-to increase the medical school quota across the nation by 66 percent (2,000 more medical students a year) immediately particularly drove the young physicians into hopelessness.
From the first paragraph of the article you posted.
its doctors are among the best-paid in the world, with the average salary for a specialist at a hospital commanding $200,000 a year. Critics of the strike say doctors oppose more competition.
From this Time article.
