Not everyone can afford 2 phones, but their employers expect them to be online all the time anyway. This is particularly true of people who work in US hospitals.
Why would you need to be able to afford 2 phones if your employer is requiring you to have a mobile phone for work? That's a situation in which the employer should provide the phone. I've been on-call or mobile-connected for over a decade, I have never had an employer even suggest that I should foot the bill for a work device. Either they've provided me a phone fully paid for work to be returned if I exit, or have covered the cost of my phone bill for my personal device in return for accessibility outside business hours.
There's no good explanation except that US healthcare orgs tend to misuse staff and clinical providers. Super-specialized doctor with untold postdoc training in faculty at my academic medical center? You've got to encrypt your personal phone to standard and install several required apps. No it is not expensed.
Apropos of the rightness or otherwise of this stance, I don't think "specialist physicians" typically fall into the category of people who "cannot afford 2 phones".
I agree. Neither do top industry execs, top sales personnel, etc. It seems from most of the comments that even in lieu of a work phone, compensation for a mobile plan is normal and expected most places. I may be mistaken, but the culture of large healthcare orgs does seem to promote an expectation that the employees be more altruistic then would be expected elsewhere, even within the employer-employee relationship.
I worked in a hospital and was oncall. My employer provided the phone. And the pager. To do anything else would be like asking an employee to provide a laptop, or a desk.
