Posted on 09/12/2009 2:00:00 PM PDT by eartotheground
President Obama has promised to pay for health care reform mostly by ridding the system of wasteful spending. The message is that reform will be painless: We're cutting the fat, not the meat. But what if your paycheck is part of the fat? More to the point: Does cutting back on wasteful health care spending mean that doctors will make less money?
Actually, let's split that question in two. The first is whether U.S. doctors are overpaid. The second is whether paying them less would save all that much. The answers, respectively: yes and no.
There's no question that doctors in the United States make a lot of money, especially compared with their counterparts abroad. American doctors make, on average, four times what French doctors earn. And it's not just because everyone in America makes more money: The gap between doctors' incomes and those of professionals is far bigger in the United States than elsewhere. In the 1990s, the ratio of the average American doctor's income to the average American employee's income was about 5.5. In Germany, it was 3.4; Canada, 3.2; Australia, 2.2; Switzerland, 2.1; France, 1.9; Sweden, 1.5; the United Kingdom, 1.4.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Yes, it will, that is something the AMA has fought for years.
Well said, eartotheground, I’ll only add that Chris is an idiot.
Which we all agree with.
Is this guy joking?
I work with physicians (medical malpractice) and let me tell you FOR CERTAIN they are ready to bail, as in retire/quit, if this Obama nightmare happens.
They are telling anyone who asks that your future “medical provider” WILL be a nurse practitioner or a physicians assistant.
You can’t add 30,000,000 to a system that already has a physician shortage. What a disaster this will be.
Can tell you,as a GP doctor, that in France doctors are underpaid and there is a big shortage of doctors worsening as a result....
You should not try
The dems could reinstate the draft and pick all the doctors. Give them military salaries. Same for journalists.
Recently I’ve spoken with several medical students. When they graduate they often have accumulated debt of 100- to 200 thousand dollars (sometimes more) for all their years in medical school. Perhaps the universities ( vastly run by liberals) are charging way too much for tuition-—nobody in the LSM seems to address that fact.
Yes they are. So are hospitals. That’s why it’s so absurd for Obama to claim the government won’t short change them, and thereby us. They’re already doing it, and have been for decades now.
Good grief they probably would if they could.
That plan has probably been written up already.
GREAT post! BRAVO!
I always thought that the "deadly" in the term "seven deadly sins" was an exaggeration. I was wrong.
This simple-minded Christopher Beam is a perfect demonstration of how envy -- one of the Seven Deadly -- indeed leads to death and dying.
Making envy a culturally permissable guide of action is killing this nation.
I think this boils down to a lawyer vs physician war. The war is being waged by lawyers against doctors.
It does not take much to get into law school. There are so many law schools out there, you eventually can get admitted to one.
I am not saying that there are no talented lawyers, just that the field is crammed full of them. They somehow have taken personal affront to physician salaries and status. It is pure jealousy.
Have you ever noticed that the people pushing for health care reform are lawyers- Hillary and Zero?
And for Medicare payments- my husband will spend a half hour with a patient, and get reimbursed $30. There is no way you can maintain a medical practice with that type of reimbursement.
Well if Obama wants to add 30 million or so people to the health roles, pray tell where will the Child-In-Chief find all the doctors?
As for your brilliant idea that drs. just refuse Medicare and Medicaid patients, some do not accept--private practices drs., which limits specialists to many children and elderly. For those ER and hospital drs. they cannot refuse because the hosp. must accept them--or all could go into private practice and leave ER's unstaffed.
FYI--all drs. have to retake boards every 6 yrs, and a friend of our daughter says he is hanging it up this year because of all the hassle with studying, trying to get paid, govt. interference, etc. ER physicians are a specialty and must be highly knowledgeable in so many fields to do their job, and they make a flat salary. It is not that large for all the hours and trash they put up with. He will be only the first of many because of attitudes like Chris's and Obama's admin.
vaudine
What Chris does is essentially suggest that doctors should be paid less and with it, no doubt, goes the liberal idea that wages should be controlled by the government.
My answer is that if wages for doctors are too high, then that would indicate a lack of supply in the market place for doctors. To ease this, you have to eliminate regulatory obstacles to being a doctor and also allow for more doctors to come into America. There’s no reason to think that a doctor from anywhere in the world can’t be brought over to the USA.
I am not saying that there are no talented lawyers, just that the field is crammed full of them. They somehow have taken personal affront to physician salaries and status. It is pure jealousy.
When was the last time you heard someone say, "Wow, I don't know what else to do with my life now, I think I'll go do med school"?
Wouldn't you like to be a doctor whose pay was slashed and have THIS guy come into your office? Heh, heh!
Wouldn't you like to be a doctor whose pay was slashed and have THIS guy come into your office? Heh, heh!
Lawyers , politicians and Acornites are the ones that are over paid.
Agreed, and even after they establish themselves in practice the expenses are astronomical to maintain a practice. A close relative was a surgeon for many years and wanted to semi retire but he had to retire mainly because of insurance, this was in So CA.
Our specialists in the USA are paid fairly. They have years of training after medical school. Easily 200,000 dollars in loans and during those years very little personal life. Yes they are paid well and they have earned it.
A case can be made for the family practice doctors not being paid what they are worth. With managed health care plans they are under tremendous pressure to cut costs and increase the number of patients they see. They work very hard as do the hospital docs.
Patients do not get to see the mountains of paperwork and notes these docs fill out. Between paper work, clinical duties, and teaching, they have a full plate of work and responsibility. They are under the gun many hours a day.
Many times at night I get calls from the Docs whom have went home and has one of those “OH Sh—! moments concerning drug therapy. The vast majority of the time we can fix it and make right.
They earn their money as do we in the pharmacy.
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