Good points re: COL. When I was working at a big University-affiliated hospital in Melbourne my rent was 750/week for a 2br terrace. The thing is, under our enterprise agreements, we get paid slightly more in rural/regional areas. So ATM I'm paying 300/week for a 3 br house with front and back yards within walking distance of my hospital but still making the 160+ that all residents my level make regardless of COL.
The money is potentially not that different comparing like for like as some say. But let me tell you, you guys get throttled on hours (and we are paid hourly rates). My hours as an intern would have exceeded 60 maybe a handful of weeks in the year. Certain rotations you're protected at 38 hours/week (eg ICU, ED). In anaesthesia as a trainee it's 86 hours / fortnight with some rare overtime. 5 weeks paid leave, 1 week paid conference leave, 5-6 days paid exam leave every year. The last 2 years I worked so little that I locumed as an ED doc and made an extra 50-75k p.a..
Student debt for MBBS/BSc (7 yrs) was about 75k with no interest, paid at a rate of 3% annual income if earning >100k. You only start to repay it once you earn above an income threshold (about 50,000).
I love America and I loved my time living in the rural midwest as a middle schooler, but I'm sometimes appalled at the training conditions for doctors, especially rate of pay of a senior reg vs. midlevel working half the hours.
The last thing to chime in about income comparison is that you guys seem to access attending income after PGY4-5 (intern + 3 years of residency +/- 1 year additional fellowship), whereas the earliest one can start training here is PGY4 (I did intern, general resident, crit care resident years), and our training is 5+/-1 years so PGY9-10 we get the income leap. Even if after COL gets factored in we are similar, it would take us several years to catch up.
