Software and Telecom are toast these days
Actually I'm in the software business (my CPA days are long since behind me). And it is better than ever.
-- and the only folks making any dough are my clients who are doctors (contrary to what you spoke of.)
You have to look at physicians' incomes on the basis of (a) what they're accustommed to, and (b) the amount of time they spend in school to get there.
Family practice is being killed by Medicare/Medicaid and over-regulation (for example, the absurd requirements of HIPAA created under the Clinton administration). In real dollars family practice physicians aren't making enough money to justify the cost of gettng educated.
High-risk specialties like OB/GYN and surgery have been clobbered by phony lawsuits, which have driven up the price of insurance. I had one OB/GYN whose premiums went from $30K to $310K. No claims. I had one surgeon who had been in practice for 20 years who basically had to sell his practice to a hospital. This is an absurd situation.
If you look at the years and hard work docs have to put in, and these ridiculous insurance costs attributable SOLELY to the abusive contingent fee structure used by trial attorneys, it is hard to see why anyone would become a physician.
Doing their taxes I see that most pay no more then $10,000 a year for malpractice insurance (usually about 4, maybe 5% of their AGI.)
This is inconsistent with what I've seen. You clearly don't do any work for Oncologists, Surgeons of any kind, OB/GYNs, etc.
Any physician that makes the claim that the increased cost of malpractice insurance is "putting them out of business" is handing you a line of shit.
Don't tell me. I've seen it, I've tried to help them get numbers that work for them, and I've seen it fail. I consult with these people on a daily basis and I'm intimately familiar with the financial circumstances of a lot of physicians. Now, are they earning 30K? Of course not. But to justify students making the sacrifice required to become a physician, there has to be a payoff somewhere. I wouldn't think of going through that process to earn 150K/200K a year.
The end result is that the reduced earnings by physicians will mean fewer physicians in the future and as a result, poorer healthcare and higher fees. It really is that simple. I advised my kids if they wanted to be physicians they had better be prepared to go for a specialty because there are better ways to make a living with less education than family practice. |
