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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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. [/quote]

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).  [/quote]

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)[/quote]

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." [/quote]

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.[/quote]

Well yeah that those injuries are totally normal. [/quote]

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