> Even in your comment: you're handwaving past physician comp and overdelivery!
I'm really not. I'm simply pointing out exactly why they have such an oversized salary. It costs a ton of money to become a physician. In order to survive, they initially need a pretty sizable salary.
After the loans are paid off, that salary can't go down, there would be a revolt if it did.
Over delivery is really just a general attitude of wanting to test everything to make sure nothing is missed. I have a hard time faulting them over that.
IMO, the way to address this problem is addressing the cost of education for physicians. There's no reason getting an MD should cost $500,000, and yet it does.
And, of course, the best way to do this is to make medical school publicly funded and tuition free. A lot of small hospitals close down because they can't afford regular doctors. It's also next to impossible for a doctor to setup a private clinic.
That won't fully solve the current salary bloat, the only way to really address that is expanding the number of doctors being trained.
Sure it could. Physician compensation, RVU billing, upcoding, and overdelivery aren't facts of nature. In fact, a lot of these problems are caused by Medicare regulation; we deliberately restrict the supply of physicians by underfunding residency slots, which is something the AMA lobbied to do.
But when institutions try to take these problems on, like when Blue Cross (IIRC) went after anaesthesiology upcoding abuses, industry lobbyists spin people up to think that insurers are demanding surgeons wake people up in the middle of operations. It's a real problem. People understand so little about how our system works that they will vociferously take the side of practitioners who are screwing them over.
(Everybody is screwing everybody over; I'm not taking a side, except to point out that Table 19 of the NHE makes a pretty stark statement about where the money is going.)
I'm really not. I'm simply pointing out exactly why they have such an oversized salary. It costs a ton of money to become a physician. In order to survive, they initially need a pretty sizable salary.
After the loans are paid off, that salary can't go down, there would be a revolt if it did.
Over delivery is really just a general attitude of wanting to test everything to make sure nothing is missed. I have a hard time faulting them over that.
IMO, the way to address this problem is addressing the cost of education for physicians. There's no reason getting an MD should cost $500,000, and yet it does.
And, of course, the best way to do this is to make medical school publicly funded and tuition free. A lot of small hospitals close down because they can't afford regular doctors. It's also next to impossible for a doctor to setup a private clinic.
That won't fully solve the current salary bloat, the only way to really address that is expanding the number of doctors being trained.