Doctors make too much money

[Anonymous]

It really isn’t the doctors salaries that are bloated….look to the venture capitalists that are sitting on the bloated boards “running” healthcare. Clinicians as a whole are pretty far down on the scale of who is earning the money from treating you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It really isn’t the doctors salaries that are bloated….look to the venture capitalists that are sitting on the bloated boards “running” healthcare. Clinicians as a whole are pretty far down on the scale of who is earning the money from treating you.

A major difference being that there are many, many more doctors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It really isn’t the doctors salaries that are bloated….look to the venture capitalists that are sitting on the bloated boards “running” healthcare. Clinicians as a whole are pretty far down on the scale of who is earning the money from treating you.

A major difference being that there are many, many more doctors.

So what??

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It really isn’t the doctors salaries that are bloated….look to the venture capitalists that are sitting on the bloated boards “running” healthcare. Clinicians as a whole are pretty far down on the scale of who is earning the money from treating you.

A major difference being that there are many, many more doctors.

So what??

Doctors' salaries have a much larger impact on the cost of healthcare.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Doc here. I left clinical medicine because the salary was rather low given my options. If I have to miss out on my kids life and my own life, I also have to maximize hourly compensation. Now I make more money doing something else. The expense of healthcare is not because of the doctors.

Except yes, it is. The fact you could make more money elsewhere doesn’t disprove that. The relative compensation of doctors and nurses and NPs and PAs in other first world countries is how we know that’s a major factor.

A few differences are that, in much of the world, doctors are able to go directly to medical school rather than to college first, adding substantial additional costs and 4 additional years not in the workforce. Then they are quite underpaid through residencies, which can last for a few-to-many years. So they are able to start practicing later and more substantially in debt (this especially layering on the comparative cost of college/med school in the US). Then, depending on their type of practice, they or they employer need to pay comparatively astronomical insurance premiums. All to say that there are several factors are play that are quite different from those in other developed countries, and that's not even getting into both the pros and cons of government healthcare providing systems. At least of my close friends who went into medicine, they are uniformly among the most dedicated, hard-working and smartest people I know. And when I compare their compensation to, say, my lawyer (I'm a lawyer), tech, finance friends, they are way, way underpaid. That said, there are of course some professions that are worse in terms of pay (notably teaching especially through high school), but at least teaching has pretty low formals barriers to entry (both in terms of comparative length, rigor and cost of requirements).

Every time I see a multi million dollar malpractice lawsuit in the news, or hear people casually throwing out the idea of suing a doctor for making a mistake, I think to myself, that’s why your health care costs so much. The practices are paying thousands and thousands and thousands a month in malpractice insurance because, ‘Murica! (I mean it’s one of the reasons health care costs so much in the US, not the only reason)

I understand some cases settle out of expediency, but they have to have a leg to stand on to get that far. Which means somebody was injured and somebody screwed up.
My overall reaction to the lawsuit issue is "maybe do less malpractice."

I remember when I was in law school (back in the late 1990s), my health law professor said that the percentage of injured patients who sue is like 12%. And now, I am among them. I've had 3 surgeries to repair the injuries I sustained during childbirth, and I'm still not "normal". But potentially facing years of litigation while having to talk about these extremely personal issues publicly led me to not sue.

Well yeah that those injuries are totally normal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I got an email from my doctor today (Saturday). Apparently he was trying to catch up on follow ups. I am not sure how much more OP wants doctors to work.

I can't remember a weekend where my Dad wasn't called into the hospital. He would also spend hours every evening fighting insurance companies.

My Dad was in an underserved high demand area (developmental peds) but he said he actually made more money doing general pediatric cases because insurance wouldn't reimburse as much for the longer consults the complex cases needed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It really isn’t the doctors salaries that are bloated….look to the venture capitalists that are sitting on the bloated boards “running” healthcare. Clinicians as a whole are pretty far down on the scale of who is earning the money from treating you.

There’s not going to be one fix. The entire system is broken from the “venture capitalists” all the way to the providers. Everyone is going to have to take a big pay cut when the whole thing implodes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It really isn’t the doctors salaries that are bloated….look to the venture capitalists that are sitting on the bloated boards “running” healthcare. Clinicians as a whole are pretty far down on the scale of who is earning the money from treating you.

There’s not going to be one fix. The entire system is broken from the “venture capitalists” all the way to the providers. Everyone is going to have to take a big pay cut when the whole thing implodes.

Nah, the boomers would rather drag society down with them. They'll fight any attempt at cost savings and allow medicare to bankrupt everyone else.

[Anonymous]

The problem is you can't cut the pay of doctors while medical schools cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. If doctors aren't paid a decent salary, no one's going into medicine because of the extreme debt load.

And the paths Boomer doctors used (military, for instance) have been severely curtailed.

[Anonymous]

Agree, focus your discontent on private equity and the billionaire class.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the differences in incomes between specialists is too great so in the respect of agree your ortho makes you much but ffs, op-use your head!

How do you think the lights in building stay on, the tech gets paid, the receptionist greets you and checks you in, your insurance gets billed etc etc. you can’t think he’s getting anywhere close to your dubious “hourly rate.”

Agreed. Honestly, though, the whole practice is probably owned by the hospital which is owned by some venture capital firm. Your doctor probably just gets a salary the same way the x-ray tech and the receptionist do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It really isn’t the doctors salaries that are bloated….look to the venture capitalists that are sitting on the bloated boards “running” healthcare. Clinicians as a whole are pretty far down on the scale of who is earning the money from treating you.

A major difference being that there are many, many more doctors.

Yet, according to dCUM, not nearly enough of them because you guys complain endlessly about having to wait a few weeks to see your specialist or having to wait an hour past your appointment time to see your PCP. Let more people into med school, you cry!

[Anonymous]

I just take all of the advice offered on DCUM and do the opposite. Things have worked out just fine.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Without question a major contributor to the cost of our healthcare is personnel costs, including highly paid doctors and nurses (relative to the rest of the first world). People are mostly wrong to blame insurance companies, which are low profit margin.

Nurses and doctors are fairly compensated for their expertise (years of education), it's insurance companies making $$$$ for profit.
A doctor making $250-300K has 8+ years of education beyond undergrad (med school and residency/interships/etc), has malpractice insurance, and I quite frankly want my medical personnel to be adequately compensated.

Also, you are paying for the $$$$$ xray/mri/medical equipment to be maintained/purhcased/replaced when needed. Those machines are not cheap

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The problem is you can't cut the pay of doctors while medical schools cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. If doctors aren't paid a decent salary, no one's going into medicine because of the extreme debt load.

And the paths Boomer doctors used (military, for instance) have been severely curtailed.

I disagree with your reason to pay doctors a decent salary. Law schools also cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but people go to law schools when over half of lawyers are not paid decent salary.

Instead, you want to pay doctors decent salary because otherwise the dumb people will be your doctors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The problem is you can't cut the pay of doctors while medical schools cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. If doctors aren't paid a decent salary, no one's going into medicine because of the extreme debt load.

And the paths Boomer doctors used (military, for instance) have been severely curtailed.

You can't cut the pay of the lowest paid doctors. You can certainly cut the pay of radiologists, anesthesiologists, dermatologists, and orthopedic surgeons. We also don't need as many of some of them.

For instance, there's no reason gastroenterologists can't administer propofol themselves during basic screening colonoscopies, which would come with a huge cost savings. But gastroenterologists are worried about pissing off the anesthesiologists by not throwing the lucrative, easy cases to them.