Is raising minimum wage nationwide a horrible idea?

[BMaker11]

darkknightkryta said:

BMaker11 said:

Euphoria14 said:

darkknightkryta said:

Nurses do far more than any doctor does.  There's actually a push here in Canada to let nurses prescribe more medication because they are that good(They recently got more power to do so).  They're as needed as the doctors who cut people up, or diagnose.  Why is there a huge pay discreprency of nurses vs doctors (Family doctors really, I understand you're point with surgeons) when nurses do what doctors can't?  Should doctors get more?  Of course, but there's a difference between paying a family doctor 300k a year vs 40k for a nurse.

Sorry to cut out the rest of your response but I felt the need to respond to this one.

My fiance is a nurse. She has worked in a dpediatric office and now does personal in home care for a 4-year old boy with severe cerebral palsy. Her sister is also an RN working at Stony Brook Hospital on Long Island.

Neither of them would EVER try to say they do more than a doctor can or that a doctor can't do what they can.

 

In order to even become a doctor you first need to do the same same schooling and pass the same tests a nurse does. To say a nurse could do what a doctor can't is ludicrous, when in fact it a doctor who can do what a nurse cannot.

No no no, they are at the patient's side during any time they need them. Therefore they can do everything a doctor does! Because administering medicine and checking up on patients to make sure they're still ok = years and years of identical training via medical school, residencies, and fellowships

Remind me the next time the doctor comes in to adminster your medicine and make sure you're alive after an incident.

Let's just ignore what Euphoria said about what it takes to become a nurse, and what actual nurses say about their jobs in relation to doctors vs. what it takes to be a doctor, and all the training therein, as well as the tasks that doctors do that nurses can't, and let's all remain confused as to why there is a discrepancy in pay between the two professions.

Let's also ignore that doctors have to learn everything nurses go through in order to become nurses....and then more on top of that to become a doctor (higher qualification should equal higher pay, right?). Let's ignore that a doctor could do everything a nurse does, but is 99% of the time needed elsewhere because there's 20 nurses for every 1 doctor in a hospital, so his/her services are stretched thin because of how many patients there are vs. nurse services not being as stretched because there's many more of them. Let's ignore that if hospitals didn't have as many patients, doctors could very well be the ones administering your medicine and making sure you're alive because they are also trained to do that.

Let's ignore all that so that you can keep those feelings that while a nurse is "at your beckon call", a doctor isn't somewhere else in the building...doing doctor thing, like diagnosing illness, performing surgeries, giving second opinions, prescribing drugs, etc. You want to paint the picture that nurses are putting in an exorbitant amount of hours each day, so they're "just as important" as doctors, like doctors aren't working an equivalent or higher amount of hours.