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This salary ranking might be of interest to Soylentils contemplating careers in medicine:
Not all doctors take home the same amount of money. Orthopedists — doctors who treat bone and muscle problems — make the most on average. Pediatricians, or those who take care of children, earn the least. And white doctors take home significantly more than their equally qualified peers of color, regardless of specialty.
This data comes from the WebMD-owned medical resource Medscape, which crunches the numbers on self-reported annual income from more than 19,200 doctors across 27 specialties for its annual Physician Compensation Report.
Friends in residency programs have often aspired to Radiology as a high-pay, low-risk specialty, but YMMV.
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Here's How Much Money Doctors Actually Make
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Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Friday April 07 2017, @12:41PM (10 children)
Everyone in the system is getting a cut.
The HR drone who helps you select a plan.
The receptionist who books the appointments.
The insurance specialist who sees how much your coverage will cover.
The medical biller who bills you and your insurance.
The negotiators who set the rates the insurance company will pay.
The nurse that checks your basic vitals and weight.
The doctor who you talk to for a few minutes.
The software developers who write the platform that tracks what happens and where your prescription goes.
The pharmacist who gets paid big bucks to count pills and put them in bottles.
The pharmacy technician who rings you up.
The scientists who create the new medicine.
The human trial coordinators and data crunchers.
The FDA to verify and approve medicine.
The Patent Office who gives a monopoly on even minor formulation changes.
The AMA that limits medical school enrollment to keep supply low, ensuring doctors' wages remain high.
The local planning boards and state insurance boards that limit where new hospitals and emergency rooms can be opened.
And that doesn't count the insurance companies themselves, the politicians, or the attorneys.
When was the last time you saw a list of prices anywhere in this system?
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Friday April 07 2017, @02:49PM (7 children)
You can follow the supply chain of any industry and see all the people who are involved, and all of whom make money off process. The fact that's it a long list of people does not imply that the industry is corrupt, nor does it imply the industry is inefficient.
I recall years ago seeing an apportionment of where the money you pay for a McDonald's hamburger goes. Very little is the price of the raw ingredients themselves. You're paying for the cashier, the cook, the landlord who owns the building, the various utilities companies who provide services to the building, the driver who delivers the ingredients, the gasoline in the trucks that move things about, the rancher who owns the ranch that supplies the beef, his veterinary staff, the FDA inspector who makes sure we don't all die from e.coli, the people who sell him the feed, etc., etc., etc.
The economy is an incredibly complex thing, and there are many, many people involved (and many, many people who get paid) from every piece of it. In that sense, health care is no different from any other complex product or service delivery.
You can argue that some portions of this pipeline are inefficient, or cost more than they should. But just counting the number of people who "get paid" and assuming that the volume of that list inherently implies inefficiency or graft is to ignore how modern supply chains work.
(Score: 3, Touché) by GungnirSniper on Friday April 07 2017, @02:56PM (6 children)
Yet McDonald's has a list of prices posted, does promotions to bring people in, and doesn't charge me three times the price if I don't have Platinum Hamburger Insurance.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 07 2017, @03:49PM (5 children)
Your McDonald's visit does not require the time of a highly trained professional with a lot of education debt. Someone who must review your record before coming to the exam room. Who must quickly asses and diagnose your problem. Quickly decide what action to take. Try to quickly decide if any of the drugs being heavily pushed by the pharmacy's drug pushers are appropriate treatment. Try to explain to patient why magical unicorn drugs they saw on TV are inappropriate, ineffective for this problem, without offending the patient into getting a 3rd, 4th, 5h opinion. Then time for documenting what just happened without using offensive language. Hope they don't get sued. Move on to the next scheduled patent and hope they are keeping up with the appointment schedule for today.
While I begin to think the way the US pays for health care with health insurance is not working as it should, the issue of high costs is a separate issue than how those costs are paid.
That said, platinum hamburger insurance sounds good as long as the co-pay isn't too high.
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(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday April 08 2017, @12:33AM (3 children)
European doctors do all of that, typically with few if any assistants, only charge 20 to 40 bucks for the privilege ... and life expectancy is higher.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 10 2017, @02:08PM (2 children)
Do they see fewer patients?
Regardless of the answer, it is interesting that there might be doctors who do not feel it is beneath them, that they are too good, to do paperwork or check patient's vitals and other menial tasks.
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(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday April 10 2017, @03:50PM (1 child)
I can't say how many patients they see, 3 to 5 an hour would be my guess in most cases, depending on speciality and case complexity.
For the ones I saw, the paperwork is typically limited to one single sheet (or its computer equivalent), essentially unchanged for 30 years. The doctor can do it while talking to you, because it's always the same.
The bigger groups (kids' orthodontist has 4 doctors) may have an assistant or two, but not the >8-for-4 that my Chicago paediatricians had.
Individual practises often have one person taking appointments for many far-apart doctors.
Throw in free med school, and medecine-is-not-perfect liability laws (i.e. insurance), and you don't end up spending 17% of GDP on health care...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 10 2017, @05:01PM
Wow, what an idea!
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2017, @03:56PM
Who must quickly asses and diagnose your problem
I prefer to be assed by amateurs.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday April 07 2017, @03:44PM (1 child)
"And that doesn't count the insurance companies themselves, the politicians, or the attorneys."
I think that is actually where most of the money we spend on health care goes.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 07 2017, @06:43PM
You forgot marketing. Pharmaceutical Companies Spent 19 Times More On Self-Promotion Than Basic Research: Report [huffingtonpost.com]