My doctor’s office gets $57 for an office visit. Typically, the visit starts with a 5-minute call to set up the appointment. Then there is a preliminary checkin and weigh-in, pluse checkout, maybe 5 minutes total.
A nurse comes in and takes information and vitals, about 10 minutes.
The doctor spends about 10 minutes.
So that’s about 30 minutes of total work, 10 by the doctor, 20 by support staff.
There’s office space, computers, and equipment to be paid for and maintained. There’s consumables as well.
But at best, the office is making $114 a person/hour for my visit, which is less than my company bills for my services. That $114 per person/hour has to pay the salaries and benefits, plus pay for lights, heat, property tax, mortgage or lease of the property, depreciation of equipment, supplies, interenet access, records retention, and a host of other things.
Now, with that money, the doctor has to pay off a couple hundred thousand dollars in student loans, has to attend thousands of dollars worth of continuing education, and has to pay thousands of dollars for malpractice insurance. He likely is owner or a contractor, so he pays both halves of social security and medicare, and has to invest for his own retirement.
The primary care physicians are NOT making a killing in the profession. They are squeezed on every side — I have friends who have dropped out and taken other jobs because they couldn’t make a living being a primary care doctor unless they hooked up with huge organizations that could better manage costs and which had affiliations with hospitals.
Charles,
Nice to see you post, haven’t heard from you in quite some
time. I have to comment on these tin foil hatters who have
no idea the costs a primary care provider has to endure, or the immense load of government inspired paperwork that threatens to drown a doctors office.
My primary doctor has refused all new medicare patients to prevent the closure of his office and he’s one of the sharpest internists around.