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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (646131)	2/22/2012 1:37:22 PM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1571565

We didn't go into medicine for the money.......your view of us doctors is perverse.

To: i-node who wrote (646131)	2/22/2012 4:57:26 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571565

So I repeat are they going to abandon 60 million customers with nothing in return???? Do airlines fly with empty seats if they can help it??? Why would insurance companies subsidize physicians...that says to me they have probably contracted on a fee schedule like Medicare has.... " Every one of which is a money losing situation" You say that a lot, can you substantiate it? 96.5% of practicing physicians , about 600,000 doctors, participate in Medicare....... " Do Doctors Really Lose Money on Medicare? March 10, 2010 at 5:00 pm · Filed under Business, Health Care ·Tagged doctor salary, family practice, medicaid, medicaid reimbursement, medicare, medicare reimbursement The media often reports that doctors are dropping Medicare patients because they are “losing money on Medicare.” Given the vagaries of the Medicare fee-setting process, it’s definitely the case that certain medical procedures are under-reimbursed, and that others are over-reimbursed, creating winners and losers within the medical profession. More generally, do doctors really lose money by simply seeing a Medicare patient for an office visit? This American College of Physicians blog post claims that is the case. It’s possible to perform some simple calculations to check the veracity of this claim. Assume that a doctor sees 16 patients a day for half an hour each, for 8 hours of patient time per day. With two hours of overtime work that makes for a 10 hour day, or 50 hours per week. That’s busy, but not an uncommon workweek for many professionals in the US. If the physician works 48 weeks per year, 5 days a week, that’s a potential 3840 patient visits a year. Assuming a 10% vacancy rate in appointments, whether due to cancellations, additional vacation, or otherwise, this leaves 3456 appointments per year. Medicare reimburses office visits at around $85 per visit [1], though precise reimbursements vary by region. At $85 per visit, a primary care physician seeing nothing but Medicare patients could expect to receive $293,760 in annual reimbursements. Subtracting out the physician’s annual overhead provides an estimate of the physician’s salary. According to this physicians’ overhead spreadsheet, 50% is a good target for a primary care physician’s overhead. Overhead cannot fall below 100-150k for most physicians, as many expenses are fixed. This would leave our example physician with net income of roughly $147,000 annually. Much more in whole article truecostblog.com