Valuing doctors

What's a doctor worth? A lot, says Natasha Kerplunksy:

A dustman is worth £1m for cleaning up the rubbish, as far as I'm concerned, and a doctor is worth £20m for saving someone's life.

Are they really? NICE doesn't seem to think so. Researchers reckon (pdf) that it values a quality-adjusted life-year at a maximum of around £35,000. This is roughly consistent with the rule of thumb (pdf) that the value of a statistical life is 120 times GDP per head - £2.5m.
On this basis a doctor would have to save eight lives  (at birth) a year to be worth £20m a year. More likely, he'd have to add just over 12 QALYs a week to do so.
Seems reasonable? Maybe not:
1. These are net requirements.  In practice, doctors also reduce QALYs through sometimes fatal errors.
2. Successful medical interventions don't so much save lives as merely postpone death, sometimes for only a few painful months. This adds little to QALY.  Much good doctoring, of course, consists in relieving discomfort or uncertainty, not prolonging life.
3. Even if doctors are worth £20m to us, there's no reason we should pay them this. For one thing, some of doctors' remuneration is non-monetary - job satisfaction and the like; you don't often find a doctor with a low sense of self-worth. And for another, doctors' pay depends upon the supply of them, not their "value." The benefit of doctors can take the form of consumer surplus, not necessarily their pay.  It's a howling error to assume that people must be paid what they're worth.

Comments

[paul ilc]

x is "worth" what an unrigged market will pay. There is no such thing as a "just price", pace St Thomas Aquinas, or a fortiori any such thing as "fair trade".

[reason]

If there is such a thing as an unrigged market isn't there such a thing as fair trade?

[David Gillies]

reason: assigning the signifier 'fair' to the operation of trade in an unrigged market is a category error. In an unrigged market the notion of 'fairness' or 'justice' makes as much sense as 'unfair quantum chromodynamics' or 'moral X-ray crystallography'.

[Geoffrey]

I think she meant she is about as valuable as a binman, and only worth a doctor's scrotum.

[OneEyedMan]

That "On this basis a doctor would have to save eight lives (at birth) a year to be worth £20m a year."

Isn't that only true if the doctor saves those people without the use of expensive equipment, facilities, and support staff? Only the portion attributable directly to the doctor's action should be counted.

[Sarah Bevins]

Good Natasha pic and I loved Konnie last month.

Please no more Kerry "Chipshop" Katona, though...

[Planeshift]

"that the value of a statistical life is 120 times GDP per head - £2.5m. "

Oh ffs. Take the advice of Bill Hicks, stop putting a fucking dollar sign on everything.

Honestly if we adopt this approach then the logical conclusion is that it will be cheaper for the state to just gas the unemployed, homeless, drug addicts, mentally ill etc than it is for the state to spend money on social programmes to alliviate such spending. Its already in the twisted logic behind those who think it costs less for poor low lying countries to be destroyed than to impose limits on carbon consumption in the developed world. Enough. Stop it.

[Steve]

Isn't her dad an economics professor?

[Dental Scheduling]

I think that NICE underestimates things a little bit.