Voters in Arizona and Oklahoma opt out of the individual mandate in the federal health reform law. Colorado voters stay in.
Primary care doctors worked an average of 53.1 hours per week and earned an average annual income of $187,857 in 2004/05. Income was 48% higher for surgeons, 36% higher for internal medicine and pediatric subspecialties, and 45% higher for clinicians in other specialties.
Why do Medicare patients living in nursing homes go to the hospital so often? Because doctors (and just about everybody else) get paid more when that happens. (HT to Jason Shafrin)
Follow up: 24 percent of all hospitalizations for long‐term care facility residents in 2006 were potentially preventable. (HP to Jason Shafrin)
Jason Shafrin is correct that perverse incentives are likely to blame for excessive hospitalizations of long term care patients on Medicare. The nursing home has one less sick patient to care for; the hospital has one more paying customer to care for.
What’s wrong with people in Colorado? It must be the altitude.
My prediction: The primary care doctors will go to work for someone else and work 40 hours a week, effectively cutting the supply of physicians services by 20%.
Is there a private market opportunity here?
Quoting the article, it actually says “Overall, clinicians worked an average of 53.1 hours per week and earned an average annual income of $187,857”. Those numbers are not specific to Primary Care Physicians. I like most of what you write but please make sure you at least have clear facts correct.
On nursing homes and hospitals and doctors, providers game the system. What else is new?
Only in America can the federal government enforce an “individual mandate,” but the citizens vote to exempt themselves from it. As messy as it is, this type of democracy is the envy of the world.
The reason Medicare patients go to the hospital more: because even a hospital has better food than a nursing home! (ok, that was a very bad joke…)