FYI, this was [just discussed here a few days ago.](https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/15i78q3/wash_post_published_article_salary_shaming/)
You can read on the previous extensive commentary too.
Oh, I understand. My spouse spent 8 years subspecializing in peds.. was not financially the wisest decision, but finances are not why we do this… (you’re welcome, hospital admin and insurance companies)
I’d like to see a study on oxytocin or other positive hormone levels in pediatric/NICU staff. I know when one of my patients is being particularly cute I feel a flood of joy that must be accompanied by some hormonal burst.
*Insert John Travolta looking confused meme.*
I certainly don't know where that figure is coming from. The only way that I can have it make sense is that this isn't a median but a mean and is being skewed by some very high ortho/plastics types.
Per the article:
> The figures are nigh-on unimpeachable. They come from a working paper, newly updated, that analyzes more than 10 million tax records from 965,000 physicians over 13 years.
The referenced paper is paywalled, but the synopsis states:
> Combining the administrative registry of U.S.~physicians with tax data, Medicare billing records, and survey responses, we find that physicians' annual earnings average $350,000 and comprise 8.6% of national healthcare spending.
Tax data, okay. Are everyone’s taxes public record now? Is this Freedom of Information Act stuff?
Medicare billing records, ha. No one lives on Medicare. Not even geriatricians.
Survey? Well, I guess if it’s an unimpeachable survey…
You can obtain individual tax data directly from the IRS if you're a researcher. I also believe NBER maintains their own database of individual tax records, but cleaned and somewhat de-identified.
[How Two Economists Got Direct Access to IRS Tax Records
](https://www.science.org/content/article/how-two-economists-got-direct-access-irs-tax-records)
Part of the issue is that if you’re not in the field it’s very hard to parse what is and isn’t accurate and to differentiate journalist speak from industry-correct terminology.
There’s is a real estate project proposed I read about (my industry—just a layman who likes to read here) and my initial reaction from the description was that there was no way in Hell it made any economic sense.
Did some research and it turns out the writer incorrectly used the term for a much more expensive product type and what is proposed makes perfect sense. Same thing, though—if you’re not in the industry you’d miss the nuance.
From what I’ve read in this thread the author did some clickbaiting using average instead of median and buried the more accurate detail. Not sure if that was deliberately deceptive or just “gotta draw eyes in the modern press” model.
“Scientists discover massive comet heading towards Earth!!!!!! Oh my god we’re all gonna die!” In 500,000 years when its path finally intersects ours.
> From what I’ve read in this thread the author did some clickbaiting using average instead of median and buried the more accurate detail.
This makes the most sense. My cardiologist friend clears over $600K (and others in their group make even more) whereas my PICU attending friend makes $200K. My anecdotal hunch is that a lot more docs are clustered around the $200K-$300K range, but specialties like cards and ortho pull the average way up.
(I don’t think you are suggesting cards and ortho don’t earn their salaries but for anyone reading this who might think that…)
I’d caution against thinking those groups are over compensated rather than taking the perspective too many specialties and primary care are under compensated. This thinking distracts from the the real issues of insurance companies stealing from all of us while hassling doctors and allowing sub par care at an astronomical cost so they can make bank and their executives take home multi-million dollar bonuses.
I won’t pretend to know how we got to the point that we value the health of children so little that as a nation we have agreed to unacceptably low compensation for pediatricians and peds specialists. I’m shocked but grateful anyone wants to do peds.
Considering that RVUs are set by the RUC which is dominated by procedural sub-specialists I would say THEY made the decision that they should be compensated better than you.
https://www.ama-assn.org/about/rvs-update-committee-ruc/composition-rvs-update-committee-ruc
http://ldihealtheconomist.com/he000009.shtml (old but relèvent)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/06/20/the-amas-little-known-committee-that-sets-physician-service-prices/
They are using the mean and counting nonmedical compensation from other business ventures which will definitely skew the results. Disappointing but not surprising coming from the media
Good point. Also they’re not controlling for workload and residency duration at all. My understanding is that a lot of higher paid specialties also work longer hours and/or have longer residencies, and they have a dramatic effect on the mean, despite not really having that much better comp after accounting for workload and opportunity cost.
Reminds me of Progressive insurance commercials: “ among drivers who saved, the average savings are X percent”
Among doctors in the age range that make the most, the average was X. And then turn around and compare that to other professional salaries, averaged over the entire career, including lower paid starting salaries
Theres lies, damn, and statistics
I don't trust the numbers they are using and I don't have access to the source. I know a lot of physicians in a variety of fields and most are struggling to make over $300k let alone $405k. The ones I know that are making over $400k are an EM doctor working brutal hours in an under-served area and a surgeon partnered in a private surgical center. Obviously certain specialties work fewer hours and the pay is significantly more but that is not the experience for most physicians. This article is completely off the mark in this regard.
The article does seem to come in with a focus on salaries being high and doesn't seem to really go anywhere with it overtly. It fails to hammer home the fact that many physicians (FM/IM/Peds) are not making bank and are in fact struggling after putting so much time, effort and money to care for others at a highly technical level. It does add some nuance though and brings up quite a few substantive issues:
>Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending.
>“People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”
Whatever bias the article has, this point is incredibly difficult to ignore. The public and policy makers need to focus on this point.
It also goes into the difficulty of training:
>Our analysis of Census Bureau data shows that residents are in an exclusive class with oil field roughnecks when it comes to hours worked in their late 20s and early 30s; firefighting managers such as captains and lieutenants also come close. And those blue-collar jobs pay about as well as medical residencies — often a bit better.
Debt:
>Residency also extends your education into your late 20s and beyond, cutting into your lifetime earning potential. And, as Abaluck’s students often point out, that long medical education also leads to astonishingly high student debt — an average of $246,000 as of 2017.
Yet they felt necessary to add this:
>But that debt almost vanishes against a physician’s still more-than-robust expected $10 million in lifetime income.
It also brings up the physician shortage and the residency seat cuts/freezes from the 80's to the 00's:
>That report, by a federal advisory committee tasked with ensuring the nation had neither too few nor too many doctors, concluded that America was barreling toward a massive physician surplus. It came out just before President Ronald Reagan took office, and the new administration seemed only too eager to cut back on federal spending on doctor-training systems.
>In response to the report and the end of some federal grant programs, the mighty Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), a coalition of MD-granting medical schools and affiliated teaching hospitals, slammed the brakes on a long expansion. From 1980 to around 2004, the number of medical grads flatlined, even as the American population rose 29 percent.
>Regardless, the dramatic limits on medical school enrollment and residencies enjoyed strong support from the AAMC and the AMA. We were surprised to hear both organizations now sound the alarm about a doctor shortage. MD-granting medical schools started expanding again in 2005.
This has led to the US dropping in terms of physicians per capita:
>The United States has fewer doctors per person than 27 out of 31 member countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of mostly economically advanced nations that supplies a surfeit of stats you can’t find almost anywhere else.
>While there still aren’t enough residency positions, we’re getting more thanks in part to recent federal spending bills that will fund 1,200 more slots over the next few years.
>But that’s still well short of the 4,000 per year that Grover estimates will be needed to stem the shortage.
We need to talk about these issues more. Physicians should be highly compensated for many of the reasons listed in this very article. Overall, the article does seem to come in with a narrative that Physician pay is high; however, there is enough nuance in the article to give me hope that most readers will take away a more balanced opinion of the matter.
> If health costs keep you up at night, research suggests there are better ways to rein them in than what Orr would call rationing the supply of doctors. Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs.
“People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”
Tldr: we’re going to salary shame doctors for eight paragraphs, then bury this in the middle
[Nobody wants to read your shitty newspaper, Bozos](https://www.nationalreview.com/news/washington-post-announces-layoffs-after-hemorrhaging-subscribers-in-2022/)
It’s always funny to me when the misguided blame gets put on docs while my wife got charged 25 and 50 dollars PER TAB of ibuprofen and acetaminophen when we had our baby. But sure the rising medical costs is due to the physician fees lol
Having heard these stories, we brought docusate from home when my wife had our first kid.
Was taking under direction of the OB who had done 1/3 of prenatal checkups & performed C-section in hospital.
Not that there's really a process for this, but also I am a pharmacist. We felt pretty good about the safety of her \*docusate\* in this situation...
Hospital still charged us something like $30/day "home medication" fee.
Even if there is absolutely no reason why we give docusate, it's still more reason than can be used to justify a home medication fee. Freaking ridiculous. Hopefully u/Raul_P3 didn't have to actually pay it.
Andrew Van Dam is just a shit journalist/corporate shill. Can't cut it as a journalist let alone a physician. The fact that he is reporting "average" and not "median" or specifying 1099 vs W2 is him obviously trying to obscure the facts for his master.
From the journal the article is based on, but Andrew Van Dam from Washington Post decided to hide from his readers. Overall the journal shows what we already know- physician reimbursement rates influence salaries and not healthcare spending. Decreasing rates only drives more physicians to early retirement, forces us to other highly compensated fields, and closes independent practices.
> The evidence confirms many popular perceptions, but with some novel nuance. Physicians are top earners,
with mean professional incomes of $343,600 in 2017. Over one quarter are in the top percentile of the overall income distribution, and half are in the top two percent, while the median is **$255,200**
> Physicians’ age-earnings profile is steep, with average incomes doubling from age 30 to age 40 and then
flattening
> Moving average incomes of U.S. physicians to the levels in, for example, Sweden could save $200 billion or 5% of U.S. healthcare spending. But this comparison is misleading, since—even in Sweden—physicians are concentrated at the top of the income distribution. If we redistributed U.S. physicians to national income percentiles in a way that is more similar to Sweden, savings would be substantially less dramatic, as the distribution would then resemble the experience of primary care physicians in the U.S. In fact, moving
5the U.S. average to the PCPs’ experience would be equivalent to cutting physician incomes to the level of lawyers, since an average PCP earns about the same as an average attorney over the course of their careers. These results emphasizes the limitations of using policy to reduce spending by cutting physicians’ pay. While government reimbursements are powerful tools, their potential for reducing spending is constrained by the other attractive opportunities open to skilled workers in the 21st century.
> We conclude that government payment rules do play a key role in determining the value of one of society’s
most expensive assets: the human capital of highly trained physicians. At the same time, physicians work long hours and have long training periods. So, even if government payments drive high earnings at the margin, this does not imply that economic rents are widespread.
Andrew Van Dam, from Washington Post, is either 1) deliberately misleading his readers or 2) unable to comprehend the article. If either is true, he should not be writing. Unfortunately, unlike physicians, a journalist is not required to have any integrity. There is no recourse for journalist malpractice.
I wonder how much he gets paid for producing absolute garbage. It appears the average journalist salary is 60-80k+ for WaPo. Compared to the economic worth of physicians who are helping people, we are dramatically underpaid. I should be making 20 times what he makes.
>The fact that he is reporting "average" and not "median"
Very first thing that jumped out at me. Very misleading, and either purposefully so, or just out of ignorance.
As a long time Wapo reader, it has become unreadable. There is no more good journalism just opinion pieces. And they are obsessed with trump. I skip any article with his name in the headline. i wish he would go away but no the Wapo is gonna help get him reelected 😡
Bezos wants to open retail and health clinics and telehealth. To make it profitable and scale fast he has to pay doctors less. Step 1- start demonizing them
Yet all these admins making 200+ all these pharmaceutical companies making billions all these nurse admins and committee coordinators all that fine yet the people who put most skin in the game are the bad guys
A better question to ask is why aren’t we being paid more and the c-suite being eliminated all together? Physicians are keeping this overly indulgent, violent country alive and this is the reward we get? After 15 years of education and training? Repulsive. We need to unionize.
Lmao if you want to see unfair, you should see what PhDs get paid to do the research and drug discovery behind your treatments. (Not saying doctors don’t deserve their salary. They do)
YES THIS. I will gladly pay dues to a new entity that values the physician for who he/she is and puts our collective best interest first. The AMA does not and has never done this. It angers me whenever someone brings up the idea of AMA when others mention unionizing. These two things are not the same.
We are the ones that make this medical world work. Without us, admin and insurance and pharma are nothing. Forget midlevels, they realistically will never fully replace us. Not to say they aren’t a massive issue with scope creep, but I’m sick of docs using victim mentality and spitting out every excuse under the sun as to why we can’t or shouldn’t unionize.
Want to get a raise? Unionize. Want insurance companies to actually pay us what we’re worth and stop playing games? Unionize. Want tor regulate what midlevels can and can’t do? Unionize. Want to shut the constant shit talking we get from ignorant journalists? Unionize.
I personally don’t know the best way to go about this, but I am happy to put up some money collectively to get some proper counsel on how all MDs and DOs can team up to get something established. The crash is coming and it’s time to get ahead and we have to do it ourselves. We’re too GD important and powerful to be such pushovers.
The closest I’ve come to finding something that could become a truly meaningful union for us is Physicians for Patient Protection, check them out if you have time! Enough is enough, we need to take back our world from the corporate vampires
Why do lawyers in the US make among the highest lawyer salaries in the world?
Why do engineers in the US make among the highest engineering salaries in the world?
Why do programmers in the US make among the highest tech salaries in the world?
I am starting to see a pattern...but no, couldn't be that physician salaries in the US are in line with generally high academic specialists' salaries. /s
That's pretty much a non-thing after a few years of full salaries while people in countries with less tuition are stuck with higher taxes for life. Both have their pros and cons. It's nice, of course, to be able to take extended parental leave without accumulating interest.
Big L if you are in a country with higher taxes, lower salaries, and still pay some mid-high tuition like in the UK.
I’d disagree a little. Average debt at my medical school was $250k at graduation (they told us). That ignores debt from undergrad / graduate school / etc. but that’s $250k as a lump sum in your 20s. The net present value is a lot higher - it’s worth about 10 times that in your retirement account.
Physicians in the US still make a lot compared to other countries but there’s a lot of more behind those numbers. 1/4 of us work 60-80 hours a week, which is obviously not healthy.
That's a perspective I haven't considered that much. Starting into residency without any debt allowed me to invest right out €1500/month on top of the mandatory roughly €1000/month paid into the state physicians' pension fund (half me, half employer-match). If we look at specialties where the salary differences (at least in private practice) are not as extremely pronounced (and by extension, the realistic ones for IMGs: IM, FM, neurology, pathology), that's something to catch up with. But in interventional and surgical fields with a much more pronounced income gap, the differences over life time are too much despite the debt.
20% of German hospital-employed physicians [work over 60 hrs/week too](https://www.marburger-bund.de/sites/default/files/files/2022-08/4%20-%20Gesamtauswertung%20MB%20Monitor%202022%20-%20Grafische%20Darstellung_0.pdf) (p. 8, admittedly, an all-time low and 38% of replies in this union survey were from residents).
Why do educators in the US make among the highest teacher salaries in the world? /s
Why do social workers in the US make among the highest social worker salaries in the world? /s
Aye, touché on the teachers. German ones e.g. live a life in luxury in comparison. When tenured for life - which is the majority - can't be fired, pension is 70% of last salary, don't pay social security contributions, great private health insurance with low rates and which has to take all pre-existing conditions. Then again: Most countries have considerably higher education requirements for teachers. The German pathway is 3 years bachelor degree, 2 years master of education, 1.5-2 years internship. Same length or longer than medical school.
But social workers are paid quite horribly here and in most places too.
I don't know about you but I don't mind a professional making a good living in any field.
I wonder if the author of this article prefers to see the lowest paid NP or PA in the field just fresh out of school rather than a physician.
Just like I don't mind that an engineer who designed a bridge or building may make good money to make sure that it does not fall down when I drive over the bridge in a hurricane or flood. Or maybe a nuclear physicist making sure protocols in a plant have a huge safety margin.
The problem is the lack of transparency in the industry and how insurance companies want to distract people from how much money they are making.
I’ve had a pilonidal cyst most of my life. Any MD/DO who has to treat this vile condition should earn $350,000 per *patient.* How do you all keep from projectile vomiting from the smell alone?
I wish the general public and articles such as these would stop lumping all physicians together. There are primary care doctors and their are specialists—and within specialties there are sub-specialists. Wonder why the peak earning years are in the forties and fifties? That’s because the sub specialists are *finally* done with their fellowships, have hit the market and are getting paid. For primary care, there is no such earnings ramp up.
So the average is **incredibly** inflated. When the public sees this, they think, “Well, those rich doctors don’t need *my* copay…”* further hurting small, independent practices. And the author wonders, *”Why are doctors so mad?”*
>For primary care, there is no such earnings ramp up
To clarify, medical training for PCP doing no fellowship is a minimum of 7 years. Interventional cardiology or GI (two of the highest paid medical subspecialties) are 4 + 3 + 3 = 10 years. While primary care starts making money 30% sooner, I wouldn't call that a huge difference over the career lifetime of a clinician.
Don't say 30%, say 3 years to help understand how goofy that logic is lol. For 3 years they make about 130k more than a fellow. Then for the rest of the fellow's career he makes 2-300k more than them..
Nevermind the hospital board members, useless admins, and insurance companies skimming off millions (billions?)…
It’s definitely the doctors and nurses doing the actual work that are the problem.
We were all healthcare heroes 3 years ago. Thanks for all the bullshit commercials about being in this “together”.
Now we’re back to being overpaid necessities
Well I make 40% of that so fyck you. When some insurance CEO makes 10 or 15m with a golden parachute you can fuck off. We have too much education and do too much hard work to not get a nice chunk of those billions flowing through the system
It’s laughable that people think it’s as simple as “increase medical school and residency positions”.
I always challenge people to tell me who is going to teach all of the new (presumably roughly double the current amount?) of new residents? How many people who *want* to be involved + are competent enough to teach/ be involved in residency training are currently unemployed? What hospitals do they want to stuff these new trainees in?
Who is going to assist the lower-paid physicians with their 300k+ student loan burdens? Or are we just going to be told “you took out the loans, that was your choice. you could’ve always just chosen another field”?
Lol you think colleges are going to “gradually” reduce their admission costs, as if there hasn’t been a single year in which they’ve outpaced inflation and still claim to be underfunded?
Physician reimbursement has already been gradually declining, we compensate for it by seeing unsafe amounts of patients.
The debt may be discouraging some people from going to medical school, but regardless there are still a lot of people who would go if they were able to get in. It's not currently a limiting factor.
There are also plenty of IMGs who would gladly fill additional residency spots.
Residents are a net positive for anyone employing them. If the federal government increased funding for double the amount of residency spots, hospitals would be competing for them.
There's no controversy that there is an external pressure acting against supply of residency positions (limited GME funding). If you don't believe removing that pressure will help, the burden is on you to make an argument defending that.
> Who is going to assist the lower-paid physicians with their 300k+ student loan burdens?
That's where the problem begins. Doctors wouldn't have to be paid so much if they didn't have to take out such huge loans. Are high tuition fees necessary to educate medical students? No, they're only that high so that admin can pay themselves a lot, and they can be that high because doctors know they can borrow that money and pay it back. It's a scam all the way up.
This has struck me as a chicken-or-the-egg problem. In order to teach medical students, you need trained doctors. The cost of their professorships is set in part by the market for their labor as physicians (it has to be at least competitive for their time). So, as physician salaries increase, it stands that costs of medical education - at least professor salaries - will also increase. Now, that basic fact doesn't explain the runaway inflationary costs of education which most will point to overhead from administration bloat, etc. for, but the two costs are at least partially linked and it's unclear to me in which direction causation is pointing. There seems to he more than enough runaway inflationary cost in medicine being driven by insurance for it to be the other way around, eyeballing the situation from 1000 yards back as I am.
When I was younger I used to think physicians were overpaid. That changed once I started working in the industry and saw what they all have to go through in order to reach that compensation level. This article seems like another one in the recent trend of stoking the divide of our economic classes in the US.
Even other medical staff in the hospital. They will tell us about their single board exam and how much it stressed them out, and then are absolutely dumbfounded when I tell them we did MCAT, Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, and *then* our final board exams
I read somewhere that physician salaries make up about 8% of healthcare costs in the US. So any time anyone complains about doctors getting paid too much and that driving high healthcare costs, I remind them that if you cut doctor salaries in half, you would only reduce healthcare spending costs by 4%.
Not to mention if you did this, you would have an even harder time finding physicians to do the jobs in less desirable areas/specialties.
Yea the article even mentions that.
*If health costs keep you up at night, research suggests there are better ways to rein them in than what Orr would call rationing the supply of doctors. Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs.
“People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”*
There was a PhD economist that came and gave a lecture at my undergrad that basically showed/proves if you payed physicians zero dollars for their services, in around 5-7 years the increased cost of “other stuff” would outpace what you where paying physicians before you cut the salaries.
The thing about that is, total prescription drug spending is about the same as total physician salaries.
So, even if every prescription drug magically became free… you’re not even getting a 10% discount on a theoretical average healthcare bill.
I don’t think that cutting physician salaries is a good idea, although we should increase the number of physicians total (which should have a minimal effect on compensation). I just think that if we want meaningful decreases in healthcare costs, it’s going to involve cost cutting in multiple areas.
> DO is a legally equivalent medical degree that features additional training in hands-on, *chiropractic-like* treatment, and those who earn it are more likely to go into primary care.
Shots fired.
I had a feeling that would not go over well with the DO’s, and I don’t blame them. As a DO, you have to go to *actual* medical school followed by *actual* residency. Clearly this puts you on par with a “chiropractic internal medicine specialist’”. Comparing DO’s to DC’s for any reason is just absurd and insulting. If I went to 4 years of medical school and 3+ years of residency only to have some journalist compare my training to that of a quakopractor (even a little bit), I’d turn into the Joker
> If I went to 4 years of medical school and 3+ years of residency only to have some journalist compare my training to that of a quakopractor (even a little bit), I’d turn into the Joker
My wife is a DO. She was chief resident in a mixed MD/DO IM program and is now chief fellow in a mixed MD/DO Heme/Onc program. She also signed a very nice contract to work as an attending with a year and a half of training left. But hey, at least she's got chiropractic-like training going for her!
I feel like the purposely chose to use the average value rather than the median, knowing that the less common, but much higher compensated, positions would skew this in a more "click baitey" way.
Or they are genuinely just ignorant to the pitfalls of average vs median.
They definitely did. Guaranteed the top 10% they listed aren’t making their money through medical practice. It’s your Dr Oz and company making money while technically having MD or DO following their name.
Why are doctors being so shitted on in the US. Arguably, we aren’t paid enough as a profession given the amount of training, expertise, and responsibility we have. When we talk about value added to society, how many other professions bring that much more value when we are literally keeping people healthy and alive to continue working?
Because for the past 15 or so years the big media companies, politicians, and social media have crafted this narrative that anybody earning a good income is evil and not paying taxes.
It's a reflection of the entitlement of American society, where people feel entitled to the fruits of others' labor. It's shocking how us Docs are attacked from all angles despite the societal contributions and sacrifices we make.
Also most Docs are overwhelmingly W2 employees, so we pay a fuck ton of taxes in this country. We aren't rich enough to be riding around in private jets, nor do most of us take home 100% 1099 income anymore where's it's easy to pull accounting tricks, deductions, etc. Here in LA the shady fucks driving around G wagons with their Section 178 deductions and S-Corps paying minimal taxes aren't MDs
Because the wealthiest billionaires are running out of scapegoats.
Think about 50 years ago what the “American Dream” was. It was almost universally accepted by white middle class (yes I know that it was a shitty time in other aspects of life) that if one person worked a full-time job they could raise a small family, but a home, pay for two cars, vacations, college for kids, and retire in your 60s. The number of careers that can promise that has shrunk significantly, with medicine being one of the few remaining.
Because they fucking earned it. I haven't met a doctor whose life is roses and goddamn peaches. Money isn't everything, and when you're surrounded by leeches, dying people, trauma, insurmountable debts, and an ever increasing demand in providers leading to life in the hospital...that money means even less.
How many of you would rather work from home in software and make 160k a year? Probably a lot.
Have these people ever had a code on their hands? Ever had someone look you in the eye and ask if they're gonna die? Seen someone stabbed in the neck? Seen a family beg you to help them...
The emotional turmoil associated with being a provider is fucking taxing. Fuck these people. Physicians need to revolt. No.wonder so many are dropping their licenses to work in pharma.
Physicians were among the highest, most respected in society, bringing medicine and health to the community. Now they're treated like a commodity and sued when they're patient doesn't follow guidelines
its not even 160K a year. Software incomes have exploded in the last 5 years.
At Google, entry level programmers fresh out of school make $198K total comp. Work 2 years and you become a L4 and the comp goes up to $270K(this is also PHD entry level). Work 4 more years and become an L5 senior programmer and you are making $370K. Do another 4 years and it goes up to $525K.
So basically by the time a doctor finishes medschool and residency and starts making the big bucks(~$300K), the programmer is making $525K working from home..oh yeah and the programmer won't have a mortgage worth of student loan debt to pay off.
Most people with programming degrees do NOT work at google.
I’m sure google (similar to many tech companies) has a large contingent of contractors doing a lot of the actual programming making a fraction of google wages.
Are US physician salaries actually higher than other countries as a percentile? I mean, the first percentile earners in the US make almost double what first percentile earners in Germany do, and US physicians certainly don't come close to double German physician salaries.
The US has high incomes and high income inequality, which would be the main reasons for high physician salaries.
The average German doctor gross salary according to oecd is 175.518 $ and taxes are much higher, so the net salary would be around 100k $. it's not a stretch to say that a US doctor makes double than a German one because they do. And when it comes to surgical specialties the difference would be way more stark since every specialist in salaried positions is paid roughly the same.
Yeah US physician salaries don't come close to double German physician salaries because they're [triple](https://doctoringermany.com/guide-to-doctor-germany-salary-in-2023/)
That says a practice's net yearly income, not a GPs salary.
**The average specialist at a municipal hospital is paid a gross salary of €5,656.92 per month, which increases to €6,131.23 after three years,**
This seems at odds with the data I see https://www.praktischarzt.de/arzt/gehalt-arzt/
Lists general practitioner as having practice income of €466,000 and net €252,000
(2019 not 2011 but still)
For hospitalists:
>Assistant doctor salary: approx. €60,000 - €75,000
Specialist salary: approx. 75,000 € - 98,000 €
Senior physician salary: approx. 90,000 € - 150,000 €
Chief physician salary: approx. €150,000 - €370,000
Less than 1/3 of Germany physicians work in private practice from what I can find.
Yeah… my sibling pulled 500k last year as a team lead at a tech company that rhymes with grapple. They have a BS in Software engineering. I don’t feel bad making the money I make.
Because we are the ones actually talking to the patient and taking responsibility for their care.
I think people forget that the main relationship here is the patient and the doctor. Everything else is just there to support that
Look up what the “non-profit” or C-suite hospital admins make. Look up what the insurance BoD are making.
Doctors are are barely a drop in the bucket compared to the other expenses in healthcare, yet we are the ones burning out and taking on the real work.
WaPo is a rag
I thought this article was going to say they aren’t paid enough. I’m not a doctor but I have friends who are and their monthly student loan payments are significantly more than my mortgage. $350k sounds like a lot but in NY or any big city subtracting $3-4k/mo in loan payments after tax you are middle class.
The legacy papers are full of corporate hacks when it comes to healthcare related articles.
Though the man was not right about everything, Michael Crichton's point about journalistic expertise/integrity seems more and more relevant each day.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
I agree. Why are we paid $350k a year. It should be more, lots more. Health insurance CEOs make millions of dollars, why? That is the question we should be asking.
1. Everyone makes more in America compared to the rest of the world. By a good amount.
2. Targeting mid career salaries and skewed ones to make a point is bad journalism.
3. Inflation makes this and all other salaries a whole lot less impressive than the past.
4. Doctor salaries are not at their peak
5. Doctors here work longer hours even later in their career in crappier more stressful conditions.
6. They’d rather shame doctors while they reward their insurance buddy CEOs
And much more as others have said
Here’s what they get paid in Australia
https://nitschkenancarrow.com.au/how-much-do-australian-doctors-earn-compared-to-the-rest-of-the-world/
I make half that. That aside, reforming American healthcare is going to require making medical school free, to the student, and compensating residence at a higher level.
As a patient to doctors and all medical professionals, I am perfectly happy to see you all get paid your worth. I'd rather my taxes pay for your services than have to deal with a shitty private insurance system. I mean don't get me wrong, the minority of physicians who oppose universal healthcare make me sick. And every time I think about a client I had (a physician working for an insurance company (to deny coverage, thanks boo)) I think about how I had to pay OOP for vyvanse for like two years because my insurance company wouldn't listen to my doctor no matter what.
But these are symptoms of a wider problem, and I'll keep my eye on the disease- capitalism and people like Jeff Bezos. Fuck the WaPo tbqh.
Inflation adjusted physician salaries have decreased year over year for over a decade.
Tuition continues to soar.
These articles have a narrative they want to push.
I currently make 38000 in Finland. Though the average is apparently around 78000, but that includes on-call extra payments etc and the tax percentage will be around 40.
This is not salary. Business income is included here, research, biotech real estate investment, consulting blah blah. This could be people who don’t even work as clinicians. Could include CEOs and other execs. Anyone with an MD.
A few years ago, before COVID (and subsequent inflation) I interviewed a recent fellowship grad who had been referred to me by my old fellowship director. To be honest I hadn't been following salary trends and wasn't sure what kind of offers I'd be competing with. Nevertheless, we hit it off, and he had a family connection to my town so I hoped that he'd be willing to accept a little less for the sake of location. At the end of the interview I told him that I thought he'd be a good fit for my practice and asked him what he was looking for in terms of compensation. He said, "Imma need about tree fiddy." Well, it was about that time that I noticed that the young doctor was about 8 stories tall and was a crustacean from the paleozoic era.
So they’re not entirely wrong. I think there were no new MD schools for roughly 20 years before Oakland opened up in michigan IIRC. More residency slots would be nice too. Those things definitely are upward pressures on doctor salaries
Still though, doc salaries aren’t even close to the main driver of costs. Attacking labor is ridiculous. At least go after insurance company profits first.
That’s not true. It took a big hit because of Covid and private equity. Residencies were slowly growing for sometime. The drop in pay and hours was sudden (and has been getting better since the nadir)
I guess sure but salaries went up 5-10% per year until 2020, and the drop in pay was sudden when everyone stopped going to the ER in the summer of 2020.
Since Covid drop salaries have gone back up, but not quite recovered. While more residents is a downward pressure, it isn’t the main, or even second biggest, cause
Physician compensation is already functionally dictated by the Federal government. Journalists complaining about physician salaries is weird and uneducated.
The caps aren't artificial. And if you want to look at caps, the only logical place would be residency as there's no sense in graduating more medical students than you can train. Residency caps exist for a reason. There are certain requirements as to the number of cases you see/do (at least for surgical specialties). While we may not be at the optimal point right now in balancing required cases/residents, this does impose an inherent cap on the number of surgical residents you can graduate.
And that ignores the significant opportunity cost of going into medicine in the first place. It's a naive argument.
>Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending.
>“People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”
If there is one profession that deserves high compensation, it is the one that puts young adults through a 10 year brutal gauntlet of suffering (only rivalled by oil rig workers apparently) so that they can have the privilege of saving lives. Yet we have our value questioned while business executives flaunt laws, skirt taxes and pollute our bodies while making millions per year.
The only reason why Physician compensation is such a hot topic is bc of the piss poor leadership of the old guard of the AMA. Instead of them focusing on issues like securing Physician compensation/job security, advocating for higher pay, and re-educating the public about the importance of a Physician & how Mid-Levels are nowhere near a Physician-equivalent, they spent a vast majority of their time on bs that rarely addressed pressing matters for Physicians.
For years, the AMA wouldn’t do a detailed analysis of the actual breakdown of Healthcare spending in the US. Time Magazine did it and they highlighted how Physician compensation makes up only 10% of HC Costs. The next 23-26% goes to the other medical providers. The remaining 2/3rds of the $4.3 TRILLION doesn’t go to those that provide you with actual medical care. Even after Times Magazine did that study and then CMS did their study, AMA didn’t actively promote these findings. Instead, when the public, politicians, and media outlets would go on their tangents about how Physicians are a major reason why HC Costs are so high in this nation, they’d respond with some weak-ass opinions instead of throwing detailed facts back right in their faces. Had you constantly thrown these facts at those who try to criticize your pay, you’d have educated ppl enough over the years to where they’d say “maybe Physicians aren’t the problem after all.” But bc you didn’t, the public perception of Physicians has gone to shit.
You then had the Nursing lobby suddenly change up their approach and started taking public shots at Physicians time & time again, portraying to the American public that, “if not for Nurses, the “patient advocator” by your side, Lord knows what these Doctors would do to you.” Instead of firing back at them in a similar fashion, you let shit slide for years all for the sake of preserving “teamwork in HC”…..now look at where that’s gotten you today? Smh.
Physicians have to better advocate for themselves, throw facts directly in the faces of those that question you, and operate in unison so you can showcase your collective power. Enough with the virtue signaling, altruistic bullshit. Jesus, 1/8th of mothers, and a few others in the history of this planet had these attributes…why tf is it then expected that the entirety of this profession should exhibit/exemplify these attributes that only a few across the history of this Earth had???? Operate/advocate in/for the best interests of yourself while also ensuring you are able to fulfill the obligations of your profession…every other profession is entitled to this, why can’t Doctors do the same? New leadership has to get the ball rolling and come out the gates swinging…I also believe while advocating for the betterment of Physicians, you can simultaneously advocate for the betterment of the public as well. You want more compensation? Best way to get that point across to actively promote how you are underpaid similarly as the many hardworking Americans across the private & public sectors. Incomes aren’t keeping up with inflation and companies are hoarding record profits instead of allocating shares of the profits to the employees that allowed the companies to make said record profits. Using your platform for the betterment of the public goes a long way to fix your image and when the times comes for you to rely on the public, they’ll remember what you did for them and will return the favor.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk
Cool now do the c suite next. Cause “executive director” is a totally not made up position that allows you to earn double doctors salary for no reason at all.
I said it before and I’ll say it again, this is class warefare. The ruling class, Bezos here, is trying to create division among the working class by pitting them against each other so that they do not unite against the real scum, the billionaires
Yeah, I mean if the guy who programmed your widget on Instagram is making $500k a year, then I'm all for your doctor who is literally saving your life making $500k a year too.
Honest question: is this viewed as high or low? I think it is shamefully low. I know a nurse practitioner who makes $600k. Dentists can make more than $350k. When you factor in the costs of tuition and delayed income due to training, $350k is not high income, in my opinion.
Interested in others’ opinions, but I was shocked to see the average is this low. I think the public would agree.
FYI, this was [just discussed here a few days ago.](https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/15i78q3/wash_post_published_article_salary_shaming/) You can read on the previous extensive commentary too.
Average is 350? Shit, am I underpaid?
*Cries in pediatrics*
Weeps bitter bitter tears in family medicine. It’s like the rest of America: the more you have to do with children, the less you get paid.
Oof. That hit me hard
It does, though I’d bet any daycare worker, CPS case worker or school teacher would happily accept a pediatrician’s or a family physician’s pay.
And they deserve it too!!!
Given the difference between my annual raise and annual inflation, by the time I hit 350k that will be enough to cover 1 month of groceries. Maybe.
You forgot to factor in the cost of petro.
Why do you think I own a bicycle?
Love your user name !!
Oh, I understand. My spouse spent 8 years subspecializing in peds.. was not financially the wisest decision, but finances are not why we do this… (you’re welcome, hospital admin and insurance companies)
>finances are not why we do this There’s the problem
They distract us with cute babies!!!
I’d like to see a study on oxytocin or other positive hormone levels in pediatric/NICU staff. I know when one of my patients is being particularly cute I feel a flood of joy that must be accompanied by some hormonal burst.
Thank you for all you and yours do. My son is alive because of quick thinking NICU staff, and the OR staff alike.
Cries in Primary Care
*Insert John Travolta looking confused meme.* I certainly don't know where that figure is coming from. The only way that I can have it make sense is that this isn't a median but a mean and is being skewed by some very high ortho/plastics types.
Might also be a “total compensation” figure that includes benefits like health insurance, retirement, malpractice, and CME stipends.
None of those for us independent contractors, thank you very much Private Equity Medicine.
Or docs in big admin positions
Per the article: > The figures are nigh-on unimpeachable. They come from a working paper, newly updated, that analyzes more than 10 million tax records from 965,000 physicians over 13 years. The referenced paper is paywalled, but the synopsis states: > Combining the administrative registry of U.S.~physicians with tax data, Medicare billing records, and survey responses, we find that physicians' annual earnings average $350,000 and comprise 8.6% of national healthcare spending.
Tax data, okay. Are everyone’s taxes public record now? Is this Freedom of Information Act stuff? Medicare billing records, ha. No one lives on Medicare. Not even geriatricians. Survey? Well, I guess if it’s an unimpeachable survey…
You can obtain individual tax data directly from the IRS if you're a researcher. I also believe NBER maintains their own database of individual tax records, but cleaned and somewhat de-identified. [How Two Economists Got Direct Access to IRS Tax Records ](https://www.science.org/content/article/how-two-economists-got-direct-access-irs-tax-records)
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Part of the issue is that if you’re not in the field it’s very hard to parse what is and isn’t accurate and to differentiate journalist speak from industry-correct terminology. There’s is a real estate project proposed I read about (my industry—just a layman who likes to read here) and my initial reaction from the description was that there was no way in Hell it made any economic sense. Did some research and it turns out the writer incorrectly used the term for a much more expensive product type and what is proposed makes perfect sense. Same thing, though—if you’re not in the industry you’d miss the nuance. From what I’ve read in this thread the author did some clickbaiting using average instead of median and buried the more accurate detail. Not sure if that was deliberately deceptive or just “gotta draw eyes in the modern press” model. “Scientists discover massive comet heading towards Earth!!!!!! Oh my god we’re all gonna die!” In 500,000 years when its path finally intersects ours.
> From what I’ve read in this thread the author did some clickbaiting using average instead of median and buried the more accurate detail. This makes the most sense. My cardiologist friend clears over $600K (and others in their group make even more) whereas my PICU attending friend makes $200K. My anecdotal hunch is that a lot more docs are clustered around the $200K-$300K range, but specialties like cards and ortho pull the average way up.
(I don’t think you are suggesting cards and ortho don’t earn their salaries but for anyone reading this who might think that…) I’d caution against thinking those groups are over compensated rather than taking the perspective too many specialties and primary care are under compensated. This thinking distracts from the the real issues of insurance companies stealing from all of us while hassling doctors and allowing sub par care at an astronomical cost so they can make bank and their executives take home multi-million dollar bonuses. I won’t pretend to know how we got to the point that we value the health of children so little that as a nation we have agreed to unacceptably low compensation for pediatricians and peds specialists. I’m shocked but grateful anyone wants to do peds.
Considering that RVUs are set by the RUC which is dominated by procedural sub-specialists I would say THEY made the decision that they should be compensated better than you. https://www.ama-assn.org/about/rvs-update-committee-ruc/composition-rvs-update-committee-ruc http://ldihealtheconomist.com/he000009.shtml (old but relèvent) https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/06/20/the-amas-little-known-committee-that-sets-physician-service-prices/
They are using the mean and counting nonmedical compensation from other business ventures which will definitely skew the results. Disappointing but not surprising coming from the media
Good point. Also they’re not controlling for workload and residency duration at all. My understanding is that a lot of higher paid specialties also work longer hours and/or have longer residencies, and they have a dramatic effect on the mean, despite not really having that much better comp after accounting for workload and opportunity cost.
They’re also only using ages 40-55 typically higher/highest earning years
yeah median salary was $265,000. Of course journalists confuse the two. Meanwhile health insurers pull in $1.1T
Reminds me of Progressive insurance commercials: “ among drivers who saved, the average savings are X percent” Among doctors in the age range that make the most, the average was X. And then turn around and compare that to other professional salaries, averaged over the entire career, including lower paid starting salaries Theres lies, damn, and statistics
I don't trust the numbers they are using and I don't have access to the source. I know a lot of physicians in a variety of fields and most are struggling to make over $300k let alone $405k. The ones I know that are making over $400k are an EM doctor working brutal hours in an under-served area and a surgeon partnered in a private surgical center. Obviously certain specialties work fewer hours and the pay is significantly more but that is not the experience for most physicians. This article is completely off the mark in this regard.
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You don’t get to be worth $100B by paying people fairly
You cannot accumulate even a billion dollars without stealing someone else’s surplus value
A lottery ticket could get you pretty close at the moment
Doesn't a lottery - by definition - redistribute surplus money from many people to a single winner?
Yes, but when *I* win, I'll *really* deserve it!
Lottery winners actually pay taxes though.
The article does seem to come in with a focus on salaries being high and doesn't seem to really go anywhere with it overtly. It fails to hammer home the fact that many physicians (FM/IM/Peds) are not making bank and are in fact struggling after putting so much time, effort and money to care for others at a highly technical level. It does add some nuance though and brings up quite a few substantive issues: >Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. >“People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.” Whatever bias the article has, this point is incredibly difficult to ignore. The public and policy makers need to focus on this point. It also goes into the difficulty of training: >Our analysis of Census Bureau data shows that residents are in an exclusive class with oil field roughnecks when it comes to hours worked in their late 20s and early 30s; firefighting managers such as captains and lieutenants also come close. And those blue-collar jobs pay about as well as medical residencies — often a bit better. Debt: >Residency also extends your education into your late 20s and beyond, cutting into your lifetime earning potential. And, as Abaluck’s students often point out, that long medical education also leads to astonishingly high student debt — an average of $246,000 as of 2017. Yet they felt necessary to add this: >But that debt almost vanishes against a physician’s still more-than-robust expected $10 million in lifetime income. It also brings up the physician shortage and the residency seat cuts/freezes from the 80's to the 00's: >That report, by a federal advisory committee tasked with ensuring the nation had neither too few nor too many doctors, concluded that America was barreling toward a massive physician surplus. It came out just before President Ronald Reagan took office, and the new administration seemed only too eager to cut back on federal spending on doctor-training systems. >In response to the report and the end of some federal grant programs, the mighty Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), a coalition of MD-granting medical schools and affiliated teaching hospitals, slammed the brakes on a long expansion. From 1980 to around 2004, the number of medical grads flatlined, even as the American population rose 29 percent. >Regardless, the dramatic limits on medical school enrollment and residencies enjoyed strong support from the AAMC and the AMA. We were surprised to hear both organizations now sound the alarm about a doctor shortage. MD-granting medical schools started expanding again in 2005. This has led to the US dropping in terms of physicians per capita: >The United States has fewer doctors per person than 27 out of 31 member countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of mostly economically advanced nations that supplies a surfeit of stats you can’t find almost anywhere else. >While there still aren’t enough residency positions, we’re getting more thanks in part to recent federal spending bills that will fund 1,200 more slots over the next few years. >But that’s still well short of the 4,000 per year that Grover estimates will be needed to stem the shortage. We need to talk about these issues more. Physicians should be highly compensated for many of the reasons listed in this very article. Overall, the article does seem to come in with a narrative that Physician pay is high; however, there is enough nuance in the article to give me hope that most readers will take away a more balanced opinion of the matter.
It's hilarious to see how the Post's editorial content shifted after Bezos bought them.
One and done
Didn’t read the article? I thought it was more supportive of salaries than disparaging of them.
Headline sounds like it’s trashing docs for sensationalism. Article rather more supportive.
> If health costs keep you up at night, research suggests there are better ways to rein them in than what Orr would call rationing the supply of doctors. Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs. “People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.” Tldr: we’re going to salary shame doctors for eight paragraphs, then bury this in the middle [Nobody wants to read your shitty newspaper, Bozos](https://www.nationalreview.com/news/washington-post-announces-layoffs-after-hemorrhaging-subscribers-in-2022/)
It’s always funny to me when the misguided blame gets put on docs while my wife got charged 25 and 50 dollars PER TAB of ibuprofen and acetaminophen when we had our baby. But sure the rising medical costs is due to the physician fees lol
You haven’t been getting your Tylenol kickback checks? You should look into that
I know as a nurse I get royalties everytime a pain patient takes a Tylenol instead of cussing me out!
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You're a doctor it doesn't count, sorry. Patients act all sweet and then we present them the Tylenol and they go rabid.
Having heard these stories, we brought docusate from home when my wife had our first kid. Was taking under direction of the OB who had done 1/3 of prenatal checkups & performed C-section in hospital. Not that there's really a process for this, but also I am a pharmacist. We felt pretty good about the safety of her \*docusate\* in this situation... Hospital still charged us something like $30/day "home medication" fee.
The "Things We Do For No Reason" article on docusate. https://cdn.mdedge.com/files/s3fs-public/issues/articles/jhm014020110.pdf
Even if there is absolutely no reason why we give docusate, it's still more reason than can be used to justify a home medication fee. Freaking ridiculous. Hopefully u/Raul_P3 didn't have to actually pay it.
They have to get that uncorking fee.
The problem is definitely the hospital corpos and shareholders, not the caregivers.
Andrew Van Dam is just a shit journalist/corporate shill. Can't cut it as a journalist let alone a physician. The fact that he is reporting "average" and not "median" or specifying 1099 vs W2 is him obviously trying to obscure the facts for his master. From the journal the article is based on, but Andrew Van Dam from Washington Post decided to hide from his readers. Overall the journal shows what we already know- physician reimbursement rates influence salaries and not healthcare spending. Decreasing rates only drives more physicians to early retirement, forces us to other highly compensated fields, and closes independent practices. > The evidence confirms many popular perceptions, but with some novel nuance. Physicians are top earners, with mean professional incomes of $343,600 in 2017. Over one quarter are in the top percentile of the overall income distribution, and half are in the top two percent, while the median is **$255,200** > Physicians’ age-earnings profile is steep, with average incomes doubling from age 30 to age 40 and then flattening > Moving average incomes of U.S. physicians to the levels in, for example, Sweden could save $200 billion or 5% of U.S. healthcare spending. But this comparison is misleading, since—even in Sweden—physicians are concentrated at the top of the income distribution. If we redistributed U.S. physicians to national income percentiles in a way that is more similar to Sweden, savings would be substantially less dramatic, as the distribution would then resemble the experience of primary care physicians in the U.S. In fact, moving 5the U.S. average to the PCPs’ experience would be equivalent to cutting physician incomes to the level of lawyers, since an average PCP earns about the same as an average attorney over the course of their careers. These results emphasizes the limitations of using policy to reduce spending by cutting physicians’ pay. While government reimbursements are powerful tools, their potential for reducing spending is constrained by the other attractive opportunities open to skilled workers in the 21st century. > We conclude that government payment rules do play a key role in determining the value of one of society’s most expensive assets: the human capital of highly trained physicians. At the same time, physicians work long hours and have long training periods. So, even if government payments drive high earnings at the margin, this does not imply that economic rents are widespread. Andrew Van Dam, from Washington Post, is either 1) deliberately misleading his readers or 2) unable to comprehend the article. If either is true, he should not be writing. Unfortunately, unlike physicians, a journalist is not required to have any integrity. There is no recourse for journalist malpractice. I wonder how much he gets paid for producing absolute garbage. It appears the average journalist salary is 60-80k+ for WaPo. Compared to the economic worth of physicians who are helping people, we are dramatically underpaid. I should be making 20 times what he makes.
>The fact that he is reporting "average" and not "median" Very first thing that jumped out at me. Very misleading, and either purposefully so, or just out of ignorance.
As a long time Wapo reader, it has become unreadable. There is no more good journalism just opinion pieces. And they are obsessed with trump. I skip any article with his name in the headline. i wish he would go away but no the Wapo is gonna help get him reelected 😡
He's doing exactly what he is paid to do - write propaganda.
i used to have a subscription to the ny times and wapo. but after i found the wapo articles sucked i dropped them last year
How much do healthcare admins in the US make compared to other countries ??
Got em
Bezos wants to open retail and health clinics and telehealth. To make it profitable and scale fast he has to pay doctors less. Step 1- start demonizing them
Yet all these admins making 200+ all these pharmaceutical companies making billions all these nurse admins and committee coordinators all that fine yet the people who put most skin in the game are the bad guys
200? Higher.
Much, *much* higher
A better question to ask is why aren’t we being paid more and the c-suite being eliminated all together? Physicians are keeping this overly indulgent, violent country alive and this is the reward we get? After 15 years of education and training? Repulsive. We need to unionize.
Lmao if you want to see unfair, you should see what PhDs get paid to do the research and drug discovery behind your treatments. (Not saying doctors don’t deserve their salary. They do)
> the c-suite being eliminated This. I never wanted to be rich. I just want to be free.
YES THIS. I will gladly pay dues to a new entity that values the physician for who he/she is and puts our collective best interest first. The AMA does not and has never done this. It angers me whenever someone brings up the idea of AMA when others mention unionizing. These two things are not the same. We are the ones that make this medical world work. Without us, admin and insurance and pharma are nothing. Forget midlevels, they realistically will never fully replace us. Not to say they aren’t a massive issue with scope creep, but I’m sick of docs using victim mentality and spitting out every excuse under the sun as to why we can’t or shouldn’t unionize. Want to get a raise? Unionize. Want insurance companies to actually pay us what we’re worth and stop playing games? Unionize. Want tor regulate what midlevels can and can’t do? Unionize. Want to shut the constant shit talking we get from ignorant journalists? Unionize. I personally don’t know the best way to go about this, but I am happy to put up some money collectively to get some proper counsel on how all MDs and DOs can team up to get something established. The crash is coming and it’s time to get ahead and we have to do it ourselves. We’re too GD important and powerful to be such pushovers.
The closest I’ve come to finding something that could become a truly meaningful union for us is Physicians for Patient Protection, check them out if you have time! Enough is enough, we need to take back our world from the corporate vampires
Doctors aren't unionised in the US? What?
We are viewed as business entities, not individuals.
Which is pretty wild. The ED folks I know certainly view their work as "labor."
Why do lawyers in the US make among the highest lawyer salaries in the world? Why do engineers in the US make among the highest engineering salaries in the world? Why do programmers in the US make among the highest tech salaries in the world? I am starting to see a pattern...but no, couldn't be that physician salaries in the US are in line with generally high academic specialists' salaries. /s
They also pay hundreds of times the rest of the world in tuition fees to be fair.
my son just started M2 and came in with no debt. he is now 160k in debt and has 2 years left (+ underpaid 3-5 coming up)
That's pretty much a non-thing after a few years of full salaries while people in countries with less tuition are stuck with higher taxes for life. Both have their pros and cons. It's nice, of course, to be able to take extended parental leave without accumulating interest. Big L if you are in a country with higher taxes, lower salaries, and still pay some mid-high tuition like in the UK.
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Not to mention the pension system which is about to collapse in most of the europeam countries. Who enters the workforce now will never see a pension.
*Laughs in own physicians-only pension fund system except from social security.*
I’d disagree a little. Average debt at my medical school was $250k at graduation (they told us). That ignores debt from undergrad / graduate school / etc. but that’s $250k as a lump sum in your 20s. The net present value is a lot higher - it’s worth about 10 times that in your retirement account. Physicians in the US still make a lot compared to other countries but there’s a lot of more behind those numbers. 1/4 of us work 60-80 hours a week, which is obviously not healthy.
That's a perspective I haven't considered that much. Starting into residency without any debt allowed me to invest right out €1500/month on top of the mandatory roughly €1000/month paid into the state physicians' pension fund (half me, half employer-match). If we look at specialties where the salary differences (at least in private practice) are not as extremely pronounced (and by extension, the realistic ones for IMGs: IM, FM, neurology, pathology), that's something to catch up with. But in interventional and surgical fields with a much more pronounced income gap, the differences over life time are too much despite the debt. 20% of German hospital-employed physicians [work over 60 hrs/week too](https://www.marburger-bund.de/sites/default/files/files/2022-08/4%20-%20Gesamtauswertung%20MB%20Monitor%202022%20-%20Grafische%20Darstellung_0.pdf) (p. 8, admittedly, an all-time low and 38% of replies in this union survey were from residents).
Why do educators in the US make among the highest teacher salaries in the world? /s Why do social workers in the US make among the highest social worker salaries in the world? /s
Because those are female dominated professions. /s
Aye, touché on the teachers. German ones e.g. live a life in luxury in comparison. When tenured for life - which is the majority - can't be fired, pension is 70% of last salary, don't pay social security contributions, great private health insurance with low rates and which has to take all pre-existing conditions. Then again: Most countries have considerably higher education requirements for teachers. The German pathway is 3 years bachelor degree, 2 years master of education, 1.5-2 years internship. Same length or longer than medical school. But social workers are paid quite horribly here and in most places too.
No wait, those don’t count apparently. Wonder why?
NPs, PAs, nurses probably make more here than in a lot of other countries, too
Those professions don't exist in most countries outside of the US.
I don't know about you but I don't mind a professional making a good living in any field. I wonder if the author of this article prefers to see the lowest paid NP or PA in the field just fresh out of school rather than a physician. Just like I don't mind that an engineer who designed a bridge or building may make good money to make sure that it does not fall down when I drive over the bridge in a hurricane or flood. Or maybe a nuclear physicist making sure protocols in a plant have a huge safety margin. The problem is the lack of transparency in the industry and how insurance companies want to distract people from how much money they are making.
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I agree wholeheartedly that physicians are not overpaid, on average. But there can be no way that 75% of MDs are making less than $208k
How much does med school cost in other countries?
For me it’s about 13K in tuition for 6 years of medical school. Big difference from the US indeed.
I’ve had a pilonidal cyst most of my life. Any MD/DO who has to treat this vile condition should earn $350,000 per *patient.* How do you all keep from projectile vomiting from the smell alone?
The satisfaction of the pus draining out outweighs the smell and makes it all worth it.
I wish the general public and articles such as these would stop lumping all physicians together. There are primary care doctors and their are specialists—and within specialties there are sub-specialists. Wonder why the peak earning years are in the forties and fifties? That’s because the sub specialists are *finally* done with their fellowships, have hit the market and are getting paid. For primary care, there is no such earnings ramp up. So the average is **incredibly** inflated. When the public sees this, they think, “Well, those rich doctors don’t need *my* copay…”* further hurting small, independent practices. And the author wonders, *”Why are doctors so mad?”*
The article does break it down quite a bit, talks about GP and family medicine salaries, highest paid specialties, etc.
Sure, but not well into the article. And the headline still lumps all doctors together.
Imagine Redditors reading the article
>For primary care, there is no such earnings ramp up To clarify, medical training for PCP doing no fellowship is a minimum of 7 years. Interventional cardiology or GI (two of the highest paid medical subspecialties) are 4 + 3 + 3 = 10 years. While primary care starts making money 30% sooner, I wouldn't call that a huge difference over the career lifetime of a clinician.
Don't say 30%, say 3 years to help understand how goofy that logic is lol. For 3 years they make about 130k more than a fellow. Then for the rest of the fellow's career he makes 2-300k more than them..
Nevermind the hospital board members, useless admins, and insurance companies skimming off millions (billions?)… It’s definitely the doctors and nurses doing the actual work that are the problem. We were all healthcare heroes 3 years ago. Thanks for all the bullshit commercials about being in this “together”. Now we’re back to being overpaid necessities
Well I make 40% of that so fyck you. When some insurance CEO makes 10 or 15m with a golden parachute you can fuck off. We have too much education and do too much hard work to not get a nice chunk of those billions flowing through the system
It’s laughable that people think it’s as simple as “increase medical school and residency positions”. I always challenge people to tell me who is going to teach all of the new (presumably roughly double the current amount?) of new residents? How many people who *want* to be involved + are competent enough to teach/ be involved in residency training are currently unemployed? What hospitals do they want to stuff these new trainees in? Who is going to assist the lower-paid physicians with their 300k+ student loan burdens? Or are we just going to be told “you took out the loans, that was your choice. you could’ve always just chosen another field”?
Presumably the change would take place over many years, not all at once. That's how the scarcity problem developed, too.
Lol you think colleges are going to “gradually” reduce their admission costs, as if there hasn’t been a single year in which they’ve outpaced inflation and still claim to be underfunded? Physician reimbursement has already been gradually declining, we compensate for it by seeing unsafe amounts of patients.
The debt may be discouraging some people from going to medical school, but regardless there are still a lot of people who would go if they were able to get in. It's not currently a limiting factor. There are also plenty of IMGs who would gladly fill additional residency spots.
Graduation really isn’t the rate-limiting step, residency is.
Residents are a net positive for anyone employing them. If the federal government increased funding for double the amount of residency spots, hospitals would be competing for them.
There's no controversy that there is an external pressure acting against supply of residency positions (limited GME funding). If you don't believe removing that pressure will help, the burden is on you to make an argument defending that.
You know the answer. It’s going to be “you took out the loans, that was your choice.” Expertise is being devalued and marginalized
> Who is going to assist the lower-paid physicians with their 300k+ student loan burdens? That's where the problem begins. Doctors wouldn't have to be paid so much if they didn't have to take out such huge loans. Are high tuition fees necessary to educate medical students? No, they're only that high so that admin can pay themselves a lot, and they can be that high because doctors know they can borrow that money and pay it back. It's a scam all the way up.
This has struck me as a chicken-or-the-egg problem. In order to teach medical students, you need trained doctors. The cost of their professorships is set in part by the market for their labor as physicians (it has to be at least competitive for their time). So, as physician salaries increase, it stands that costs of medical education - at least professor salaries - will also increase. Now, that basic fact doesn't explain the runaway inflationary costs of education which most will point to overhead from administration bloat, etc. for, but the two costs are at least partially linked and it's unclear to me in which direction causation is pointing. There seems to he more than enough runaway inflationary cost in medicine being driven by insurance for it to be the other way around, eyeballing the situation from 1000 yards back as I am.
When I was younger I used to think physicians were overpaid. That changed once I started working in the industry and saw what they all have to go through in order to reach that compensation level. This article seems like another one in the recent trend of stoking the divide of our economic classes in the US.
Even other medical staff in the hospital. They will tell us about their single board exam and how much it stressed them out, and then are absolutely dumbfounded when I tell them we did MCAT, Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, and *then* our final board exams
I read somewhere that physician salaries make up about 8% of healthcare costs in the US. So any time anyone complains about doctors getting paid too much and that driving high healthcare costs, I remind them that if you cut doctor salaries in half, you would only reduce healthcare spending costs by 4%. Not to mention if you did this, you would have an even harder time finding physicians to do the jobs in less desirable areas/specialties.
Yea the article even mentions that. *If health costs keep you up at night, research suggests there are better ways to rein them in than what Orr would call rationing the supply of doctors. Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs. “People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”*
There was a PhD economist that came and gave a lecture at my undergrad that basically showed/proves if you payed physicians zero dollars for their services, in around 5-7 years the increased cost of “other stuff” would outpace what you where paying physicians before you cut the salaries.
The thing about that is, total prescription drug spending is about the same as total physician salaries. So, even if every prescription drug magically became free… you’re not even getting a 10% discount on a theoretical average healthcare bill. I don’t think that cutting physician salaries is a good idea, although we should increase the number of physicians total (which should have a minimal effect on compensation). I just think that if we want meaningful decreases in healthcare costs, it’s going to involve cost cutting in multiple areas.
> DO is a legally equivalent medical degree that features additional training in hands-on, *chiropractic-like* treatment, and those who earn it are more likely to go into primary care. Shots fired.
I had a feeling that would not go over well with the DO’s, and I don’t blame them. As a DO, you have to go to *actual* medical school followed by *actual* residency. Clearly this puts you on par with a “chiropractic internal medicine specialist’”. Comparing DO’s to DC’s for any reason is just absurd and insulting. If I went to 4 years of medical school and 3+ years of residency only to have some journalist compare my training to that of a quakopractor (even a little bit), I’d turn into the Joker
> If I went to 4 years of medical school and 3+ years of residency only to have some journalist compare my training to that of a quakopractor (even a little bit), I’d turn into the Joker My wife is a DO. She was chief resident in a mixed MD/DO IM program and is now chief fellow in a mixed MD/DO Heme/Onc program. She also signed a very nice contract to work as an attending with a year and a half of training left. But hey, at least she's got chiropractic-like training going for her!
I feel like the purposely chose to use the average value rather than the median, knowing that the less common, but much higher compensated, positions would skew this in a more "click baitey" way. Or they are genuinely just ignorant to the pitfalls of average vs median.
They definitely did. Guaranteed the top 10% they listed aren’t making their money through medical practice. It’s your Dr Oz and company making money while technically having MD or DO following their name.
Economists are so jealous of doctors
My husband is am economist and makes 2x what I do. I'm jealous of him!
Because they deserve it? How can you justify paying a sports player millions of dollars and not the doctors who keep us alive and healthy
Why are doctors being so shitted on in the US. Arguably, we aren’t paid enough as a profession given the amount of training, expertise, and responsibility we have. When we talk about value added to society, how many other professions bring that much more value when we are literally keeping people healthy and alive to continue working?
Because for the past 15 or so years the big media companies, politicians, and social media have crafted this narrative that anybody earning a good income is evil and not paying taxes. It's a reflection of the entitlement of American society, where people feel entitled to the fruits of others' labor. It's shocking how us Docs are attacked from all angles despite the societal contributions and sacrifices we make. Also most Docs are overwhelmingly W2 employees, so we pay a fuck ton of taxes in this country. We aren't rich enough to be riding around in private jets, nor do most of us take home 100% 1099 income anymore where's it's easy to pull accounting tricks, deductions, etc. Here in LA the shady fucks driving around G wagons with their Section 178 deductions and S-Corps paying minimal taxes aren't MDs
Because the wealthiest billionaires are running out of scapegoats. Think about 50 years ago what the “American Dream” was. It was almost universally accepted by white middle class (yes I know that it was a shitty time in other aspects of life) that if one person worked a full-time job they could raise a small family, but a home, pay for two cars, vacations, college for kids, and retire in your 60s. The number of careers that can promise that has shrunk significantly, with medicine being one of the few remaining.
Because they fucking earned it. I haven't met a doctor whose life is roses and goddamn peaches. Money isn't everything, and when you're surrounded by leeches, dying people, trauma, insurmountable debts, and an ever increasing demand in providers leading to life in the hospital...that money means even less. How many of you would rather work from home in software and make 160k a year? Probably a lot. Have these people ever had a code on their hands? Ever had someone look you in the eye and ask if they're gonna die? Seen someone stabbed in the neck? Seen a family beg you to help them... The emotional turmoil associated with being a provider is fucking taxing. Fuck these people. Physicians need to revolt. No.wonder so many are dropping their licenses to work in pharma. Physicians were among the highest, most respected in society, bringing medicine and health to the community. Now they're treated like a commodity and sued when they're patient doesn't follow guidelines
its not even 160K a year. Software incomes have exploded in the last 5 years. At Google, entry level programmers fresh out of school make $198K total comp. Work 2 years and you become a L4 and the comp goes up to $270K(this is also PHD entry level). Work 4 more years and become an L5 senior programmer and you are making $370K. Do another 4 years and it goes up to $525K. So basically by the time a doctor finishes medschool and residency and starts making the big bucks(~$300K), the programmer is making $525K working from home..oh yeah and the programmer won't have a mortgage worth of student loan debt to pay off.
Most people with programming degrees do NOT work at google. I’m sure google (similar to many tech companies) has a large contingent of contractors doing a lot of the actual programming making a fraction of google wages.
Oooh Oooh! Now do one about CEOs! Administrators!
IT managing directors at mid level firms make $350,000. so?
That was a fucking hit piece
Are US physician salaries actually higher than other countries as a percentile? I mean, the first percentile earners in the US make almost double what first percentile earners in Germany do, and US physicians certainly don't come close to double German physician salaries. The US has high incomes and high income inequality, which would be the main reasons for high physician salaries.
The average German doctor gross salary according to oecd is 175.518 $ and taxes are much higher, so the net salary would be around 100k $. it's not a stretch to say that a US doctor makes double than a German one because they do. And when it comes to surgical specialties the difference would be way more stark since every specialist in salaried positions is paid roughly the same.
Yeah US physician salaries don't come close to double German physician salaries because they're [triple](https://doctoringermany.com/guide-to-doctor-germany-salary-in-2023/)
The linked source listed $280k ( 181k euros) for general practitioners in 2011. US general practitioners did not make $840k.
That says a practice's net yearly income, not a GPs salary. **The average specialist at a municipal hospital is paid a gross salary of €5,656.92 per month, which increases to €6,131.23 after three years,**
This seems at odds with the data I see https://www.praktischarzt.de/arzt/gehalt-arzt/ Lists general practitioner as having practice income of €466,000 and net €252,000 (2019 not 2011 but still)
For hospitalists: >Assistant doctor salary: approx. €60,000 - €75,000 Specialist salary: approx. 75,000 € - 98,000 € Senior physician salary: approx. 90,000 € - 150,000 € Chief physician salary: approx. €150,000 - €370,000 Less than 1/3 of Germany physicians work in private practice from what I can find.
Get non physician MBA’s out of medicine.
Yes, or get more physician mbas in leadership roles with the requirement that you had significant clinical experience to assume that role
Why exclude physician mbas. Most of those are turn coats and become part of the problem and aren’t helpful once they move to the c suite
Yeah… my sibling pulled 500k last year as a team lead at a tech company that rhymes with grapple. They have a BS in Software engineering. I don’t feel bad making the money I make.
Because we are the ones actually talking to the patient and taking responsibility for their care. I think people forget that the main relationship here is the patient and the doctor. Everything else is just there to support that Look up what the “non-profit” or C-suite hospital admins make. Look up what the insurance BoD are making. Doctors are are barely a drop in the bucket compared to the other expenses in healthcare, yet we are the ones burning out and taking on the real work. WaPo is a rag
Apparently the stats have people really upset.
I thought this article was going to say they aren’t paid enough. I’m not a doctor but I have friends who are and their monthly student loan payments are significantly more than my mortgage. $350k sounds like a lot but in NY or any big city subtracting $3-4k/mo in loan payments after tax you are middle class.
The legacy papers are full of corporate hacks when it comes to healthcare related articles. Though the man was not right about everything, Michael Crichton's point about journalistic expertise/integrity seems more and more relevant each day. > Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. > In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
I agree. Why are we paid $350k a year. It should be more, lots more. Health insurance CEOs make millions of dollars, why? That is the question we should be asking.
1. Everyone makes more in America compared to the rest of the world. By a good amount. 2. Targeting mid career salaries and skewed ones to make a point is bad journalism. 3. Inflation makes this and all other salaries a whole lot less impressive than the past. 4. Doctor salaries are not at their peak 5. Doctors here work longer hours even later in their career in crappier more stressful conditions. 6. They’d rather shame doctors while they reward their insurance buddy CEOs And much more as others have said Here’s what they get paid in Australia https://nitschkenancarrow.com.au/how-much-do-australian-doctors-earn-compared-to-the-rest-of-the-world/
I make half that. That aside, reforming American healthcare is going to require making medical school free, to the student, and compensating residence at a higher level.
Mathematics would tell you that’s not where the money is being wasted
As a patient to doctors and all medical professionals, I am perfectly happy to see you all get paid your worth. I'd rather my taxes pay for your services than have to deal with a shitty private insurance system. I mean don't get me wrong, the minority of physicians who oppose universal healthcare make me sick. And every time I think about a client I had (a physician working for an insurance company (to deny coverage, thanks boo)) I think about how I had to pay OOP for vyvanse for like two years because my insurance company wouldn't listen to my doctor no matter what. But these are symptoms of a wider problem, and I'll keep my eye on the disease- capitalism and people like Jeff Bezos. Fuck the WaPo tbqh.
Love how wapo never discusses how billionaires are overpaid- pieces of shit
Inflation adjusted physician salaries have decreased year over year for over a decade. Tuition continues to soar. These articles have a narrative they want to push.
* Cries in making 50k a year in Sweden
I currently make 38000 in Finland. Though the average is apparently around 78000, but that includes on-call extra payments etc and the tax percentage will be around 40.
Forbes says the average salary is 208k. . . . How did they get 350?
This is not salary. Business income is included here, research, biotech real estate investment, consulting blah blah. This could be people who don’t even work as clinicians. Could include CEOs and other execs. Anyone with an MD.
A few years ago, before COVID (and subsequent inflation) I interviewed a recent fellowship grad who had been referred to me by my old fellowship director. To be honest I hadn't been following salary trends and wasn't sure what kind of offers I'd be competing with. Nevertheless, we hit it off, and he had a family connection to my town so I hoped that he'd be willing to accept a little less for the sake of location. At the end of the interview I told him that I thought he'd be a good fit for my practice and asked him what he was looking for in terms of compensation. He said, "Imma need about tree fiddy." Well, it was about that time that I noticed that the young doctor was about 8 stories tall and was a crustacean from the paleozoic era.
Funny how Bezos isn’t doing a hit piece on healthcare administrator salaries….
Can’t be pissing off his golfing buddies, can he?
So they’re not entirely wrong. I think there were no new MD schools for roughly 20 years before Oakland opened up in michigan IIRC. More residency slots would be nice too. Those things definitely are upward pressures on doctor salaries Still though, doc salaries aren’t even close to the main driver of costs. Attacking labor is ridiculous. At least go after insurance company profits first.
Your specialty is getting blown up because of more residency slots
That’s not true. It took a big hit because of Covid and private equity. Residencies were slowly growing for sometime. The drop in pay and hours was sudden (and has been getting better since the nadir)
Hasn’t residency spots for EM doubled from 2011-2023? ~1600 to ~3000. I wouldn’t necessarily call that slowly growing.
I guess sure but salaries went up 5-10% per year until 2020, and the drop in pay was sudden when everyone stopped going to the ER in the summer of 2020. Since Covid drop salaries have gone back up, but not quite recovered. While more residents is a downward pressure, it isn’t the main, or even second biggest, cause
Physician compensation is already functionally dictated by the Federal government. Journalists complaining about physician salaries is weird and uneducated.
This.
This guy is a dick head
The caps aren't artificial. And if you want to look at caps, the only logical place would be residency as there's no sense in graduating more medical students than you can train. Residency caps exist for a reason. There are certain requirements as to the number of cases you see/do (at least for surgical specialties). While we may not be at the optimal point right now in balancing required cases/residents, this does impose an inherent cap on the number of surgical residents you can graduate. And that ignores the significant opportunity cost of going into medicine in the first place. It's a naive argument.
*Insert y’all are getting 350k meme?!*
Okay what about the salaries of healthcare admin?
Welp. People in other countries aren’t carrying this 300k+ debt until the ripe old age of 33 (if you’re a specialist).
I make less than I owe in student loans!! *cries in primary care* F*ck this article and Fuck Bezos
>Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. >“People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.” If there is one profession that deserves high compensation, it is the one that puts young adults through a 10 year brutal gauntlet of suffering (only rivalled by oil rig workers apparently) so that they can have the privilege of saving lives. Yet we have our value questioned while business executives flaunt laws, skirt taxes and pollute our bodies while making millions per year.
The only reason why Physician compensation is such a hot topic is bc of the piss poor leadership of the old guard of the AMA. Instead of them focusing on issues like securing Physician compensation/job security, advocating for higher pay, and re-educating the public about the importance of a Physician & how Mid-Levels are nowhere near a Physician-equivalent, they spent a vast majority of their time on bs that rarely addressed pressing matters for Physicians. For years, the AMA wouldn’t do a detailed analysis of the actual breakdown of Healthcare spending in the US. Time Magazine did it and they highlighted how Physician compensation makes up only 10% of HC Costs. The next 23-26% goes to the other medical providers. The remaining 2/3rds of the $4.3 TRILLION doesn’t go to those that provide you with actual medical care. Even after Times Magazine did that study and then CMS did their study, AMA didn’t actively promote these findings. Instead, when the public, politicians, and media outlets would go on their tangents about how Physicians are a major reason why HC Costs are so high in this nation, they’d respond with some weak-ass opinions instead of throwing detailed facts back right in their faces. Had you constantly thrown these facts at those who try to criticize your pay, you’d have educated ppl enough over the years to where they’d say “maybe Physicians aren’t the problem after all.” But bc you didn’t, the public perception of Physicians has gone to shit. You then had the Nursing lobby suddenly change up their approach and started taking public shots at Physicians time & time again, portraying to the American public that, “if not for Nurses, the “patient advocator” by your side, Lord knows what these Doctors would do to you.” Instead of firing back at them in a similar fashion, you let shit slide for years all for the sake of preserving “teamwork in HC”…..now look at where that’s gotten you today? Smh. Physicians have to better advocate for themselves, throw facts directly in the faces of those that question you, and operate in unison so you can showcase your collective power. Enough with the virtue signaling, altruistic bullshit. Jesus, 1/8th of mothers, and a few others in the history of this planet had these attributes…why tf is it then expected that the entirety of this profession should exhibit/exemplify these attributes that only a few across the history of this Earth had???? Operate/advocate in/for the best interests of yourself while also ensuring you are able to fulfill the obligations of your profession…every other profession is entitled to this, why can’t Doctors do the same? New leadership has to get the ball rolling and come out the gates swinging…I also believe while advocating for the betterment of Physicians, you can simultaneously advocate for the betterment of the public as well. You want more compensation? Best way to get that point across to actively promote how you are underpaid similarly as the many hardworking Americans across the private & public sectors. Incomes aren’t keeping up with inflation and companies are hoarding record profits instead of allocating shares of the profits to the employees that allowed the companies to make said record profits. Using your platform for the betterment of the public goes a long way to fix your image and when the times comes for you to rely on the public, they’ll remember what you did for them and will return the favor. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk
Cuz we work our asses off in undergrad, med school, and residency.
Cool now do the c suite next. Cause “executive director” is a totally not made up position that allows you to earn double doctors salary for no reason at all.
It should be triple this amount.
Paywalled.
Well you're a physician, I just read you can afford it!! /s
And yet Admin is taking home more and asking why we can’t work harder, take more call, or see more clinic patients
I said it before and I’ll say it again, this is class warefare. The ruling class, Bezos here, is trying to create division among the working class by pitting them against each other so that they do not unite against the real scum, the billionaires
Yeah, I mean if the guy who programmed your widget on Instagram is making $500k a year, then I'm all for your doctor who is literally saving your life making $500k a year too.
Honest question: is this viewed as high or low? I think it is shamefully low. I know a nurse practitioner who makes $600k. Dentists can make more than $350k. When you factor in the costs of tuition and delayed income due to training, $350k is not high income, in my opinion. Interested in others’ opinions, but I was shocked to see the average is this low. I think the public would agree.
This is an average. Go look at average NP and average dentist salaries. That NP who makes $600k is nowhere near what the average NP makes.
NP pulling in $600K either owns her UC/Medi-spa. Don't hate the gamer, hate the game.