Posted on 10/04/2010 8:56:52 PM PDT by freespirited
Nearly 200 Los Angeles County employees earned more than a quarter of a million dollars in 2009.
The list of the county's top earners reported Monday in the Los Angeles Times was in response to a public records act request from the newspaper.
Many of the workers named on the list include physicians, county firefighters and a handful of top sheriff's employees.
Topping the list is Elaine Yang, a senior physician at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center who earned $430,909 in 2009.
The county counsel's office had delayed the release of the information to the Times, saying it needed time to give all 100,000 county employees the opportunity to object to the release of their names for what they called "personal safety reasons."
Millions of government bureaucrat employees financially gang raping Americans....What a surprise.
And the California government wonders why they’re so deep in the red.
No wonder the whole state of CA is BANKRUPT. What the Hell is going on in America. We are heading for the cliff.
Hmm, I thought Doctors on the government payroll didn’t earn much of anything.
why does yang get so much?
Well, that’s fine ‘cause Obammy’s going to tax them and not us. They should have only made $249,999 like the rest of us. /s
In the federal govt, doctors with rare skills can earn more than the salary limit, but I have never heard of regular docs getting this kind of compensation.
I have no idea what goes on in California, I dont even like to think about the place.
Tip of the iceberg ... guess what the perks cost?
I have no idea. Looks like she's a pediatrician, I have long been under the impression that pediatrics is one of the lower paying fields of medicine.
Well, for starters, the pensions can be almost as high as the salaries.
And I’m sure that they earned and deserve every single penny of it.
LOL, no I don’t. I used to live in LA and I know what the city employees were worth.
I tried to get on the LAFD many decades ago, bad hearing kept me out. But I do remember clearly the types that were firemen, like my next door neighbor that had me come hang out with him at his station.
Essentially, lower bell curve dwellers, maybe HS graduates, maybe not, liked to yell racial crap at the TV during their mostly uneventful days.
I am sooo glad I pay nothing to that cesspool of a county anymore...........
She’s really not paid that much on a relative scale. The average anesthesiologist in LA/OC makes about $400,000 per year. She’s at the top of her profession it appears and making “just” an average salary.
That said, as a physician, I happen to think that anesthesiologists and radiologists are probably the most overpaid of all physicians. Needless to say, I’m not an anesthesiologist or a radiologist. ;)
Those salaries will drop. In the 1990s it was believed that CRNAs would begin to replace anesthesiologists, so no one went into anesthesiology. Turns out that was completely wrong and really impractical. So supply was way down and demand way up for anesthesiologists. Hence their salries—well above most general surgeons with better hours.
CRNAs make more than many primary care physicians, for that matter.
It’s actually much more difficult than you think being a doctor for the county. Many doctors treat inmates or indigents who are looking for a reason to sue the deep pockets of the County of Los Angeles. The potential to lose your license is ever present in this situation. It’s worse than being a veterinarian since you don’t know whether to believe a patient or not.
Aren’t anesthesiologists pretty high up on the probability-of-malpractice-lawsuit scale?
This reminds me of something. At no time during the Healthcare Law debate did I hear anything about one obvious huge source of costs: taxes. Personal income taxes on doctors, nurses, etc.
Imagine a doctor earning $500K/yr. Between Federal and CA income taxes, that doctor will only take home $260K. Now imagine we had Flat taxes at both Federal and CA levels. To bring in the same revenues as today, the Federal tax rate would need to be 10% and the CA rate 4%. To bring home $260K, that doctor would only need to charge his patients 260 / (1 - 14%) = 260 / (0.86) = 302K, so the doctor would be just as well off while charging his patients 40% less. If all medical costs were going into the pockets of doctors, that means switching to Flat taxes would cut the cost of healthcare by 40%.
Of course, there are many other costs involved, and many lower salaried (lower taxed) staff involved, but still ... the high marginal income tax rates on highly paid doctors, nurses, administrators, etc. must be a fairly large component of total healthcare costs, right ? And why is it never mentioned, while insurance company profits account for only 3% of total costs yet the insurance companies got pilloried ?
So how much could healthcare costs be reduced overall by switching to a 10% Flat tax ?
While I appreciate your comments; they have absolutely nothing to do with my comment.
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