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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: skinowski who wrote (7131)	6/20/2009 11:14:36 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Here's the primary care conundrum. 173K is good money, of course, but "average" means that very many struggle and make much less - while working and taking calls 24/7. No wonder that only 2% of med students want to have a career in primary care. It truly is; how can a person justify the massive time, effort, money to attend the best schools in the land, come out the other side with massive school loans -- and anticipate earning 173K? You have to be very committed to being a FP doc to do this. Yet, I saw a physician on the news yesterday talking about how he was adequately paid by Medicare, he held up his 1099 showing something like 160K (gross) revenue from Medicare and said he thought it was enough. What occurred to me was he was a man who had no idea what is going on financially with his medical practice. Probably loves taking care of patients, hates dealing with the money aspects of it, and has no idea how much money it costs him to have a Medicare patient versus a privately insured one. And the writing is on the wall -- reimbursements from government programs, if they get their way, are going to take a hit.

To: skinowski who wrote (7131)	6/20/2009 8:25:03 PM
From: John Koligman	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Then perhaps we need to attack the disparity in pay between the primaries and specialists. Is there a reason a radiologist should make two or three times what a primary care doc makes? Do they go through that much more training? Or is the problem that as so many articles say, our 'procedures driven' system helps cause the disparity? In theory, in a free market system if enough labor crowds into a particular category, the wages of that labor should come under pressure. I haven't done any looking around the net to see what specialists pay has done over the past decade, but will if I get some time. It would be interesting to see if they have outpaced the average in America over the past decade, which has not been kind in terms of wage growth to just about everyone except those at the very top...