“Thank God I’m retiring in 278 days, 2 hours and 58 minutes.”
I am going to try to work for 7 more years, but I don’t accept any insurance, so it’s paper records for me.
If I can’t survive under Obamacare in private practice for that amount of time, I’ll try to work at a V.A. and take care of veterans.
At least I’ll be paying them back in some small way for the safety and security that I have enjoyed these many years.
I have never been a VA employee physician, but have treated hundreds of veterans through contract services with the VA. Unfortunately, my observation is that the VA system is an example of socialized medicine at its worst. What normally takes days in private practice routinely takes weeks or months at the VA.
Similar strategy: Shrink in solo private practice in underserved area, end of career boutique practice, but still mostly take commercial insurances, and no EMR - now, or ever, for multiple financial and patient-care reasons.
My specialty is one in which one can still work late into life, and one in which one continues to improve over the years by gaining more and more of the subtle knowledge one needs to do it well. But I’m considering several early retirement options, and will certainly quit once they force me into the EMR.
Local VA and possibly military hospital work here may see me through for a few more years, but my main strategy if I just want semi-retirement for a few more years will be to go back to locum tenens work, which I did, and enjoyed, when I was much younger. Between overall attrition for better-paying or more respectable specialties, there are few of us shrinks left now, so demand and compensation for locums docs is high in this specialty.