Doctors Pay
Medicare, for example, pays an ophthalmologist nearly $600 for cataract surgery and the insertion of an artificial lens. (As a medical school colleague once told me: The best job in medicine may be an ophthalmologist in Florida.) Medicare pays a gastroenterologist about $200 for a screening colonoscopy. These procedures take about 20 minutes or less.
In contrast, Medicare pays primary-care doctors about $100 for a visit that might take more than half an hour and involve evaluating and managing a complicated patient with diabetes, emphysema and congestive heart failure.
Full article on physicians’ earnings from The Washington Post.
My brother-in-law is a primary care physician, who is board certified in family practice. A few years ago he was recruited to join a group practice that required him to move his family. He quickly abandoned it because too many of his new patients were on Medicare and they all needed 30 minutes per visit.
“We may have come to medical school to help people, but we choose our specialty careers based on potential salaries.”
This about sums it up.
Interesting… When you dont let markets work, the govt determines the outcomes!
The summary is just as dumb as the labor theory of value nonsense behind the RBRVS that Medicare uses to set prices. Thinking that physician time is the proper determinant of price is thinking like a Marxist and we all know how successful economies built on those principles are.
Other things that matter include capital investment, productivity, risk, other required staffing, depreciation, and differential regulatory costs. Not to mention demand.
Bottom line: nobody knows what the proper prices should be and Medicare shouldn’t be setting them.
The reason anyone does anything is almost always money. Doctors will naturally gravitate toward the fields that pay the most; it’s simple economics.
Sounds like i should try and become an ophthalmologist in Florida.
This horse is dead, and thoroughly beaten.
Is it any wonder that surveys show that two of three Americans think that doctors are “too interested in the money”? As the shortage of primary-care doctor worsens, patients need to speak up — since, after all, much of the physician’s salary is coming from their pockets, directly or indirectly.
Two things about this statement are right on!
1. Yes, many Americans think that doctors are more interested in the money they make rather than the well-being of their patients…is that unethical? unconstitutional? It surely sounds really bad… but, as Alex pointed out, that’s simple economics.
2. Physicians’ earnings vary inmensely from position to position, and from state to state…at the end that money is coming out of our pockets (patients), so why should other insurance programs or even the government itself be deciding what these prices should be? It’s not up to them.
Even more people are earning big bucks from the government via ballooned Medicare payments? Shocking.