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The only way to make my pay competitive is to see 5 patients an hour.
Which I do routinely.
How safe or sustainable do you think that is?
My orthopedic colleagues work 60+ hours a week, not including call.
I am not going to ask you to tell me what you earn. However, I bet you are somewhere around that national average. The vast majority of Americans including college educated professionals don't earn between $200,000 and $400,000 a year. Whether or not seeing 5 patients an hour is safe or not I think would depend on the nature of their emergency. Minor cuts would not be a great issue. Head trauma would be. I have trouble believing something could not be worked out though where a doctor agrees to see 3 patients an hour in return for a pay cut from $200,000 a year to $133,000 a year.
I have more knowledge of how much orthopedic surgeons work than you probably think I do. My BIL does not work 60 hours a week. How unique he is I do not know. Most of us though would probably choose to work overtime if we could earn $400,000 a year doing it. Its not an option for me and so I don't do it.
U.S. Medical schools can only produce so many doctors a year. Any deficit will have to addressed either by Nurse Practitioners or FMG's (Foreign Medical Graduates).
Read the article in the OP. Med school is not the bottleneck. Residencies are.
But fingers aren’t just pointing at medical schools. Fear of a doctor surplus prompted a 1997 payment cap on Medicare funding for residencies, which has served as a “stumbling block” for doctor training ever since, John Iglehart wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013.
So as medical-school enrollment has swelled — medical schools planned to increase their enrollment classes by almost 30% between 2002 and 2016, according to Iglehart — residency-slot expansion has slumped.
The problem is finding people with both the ability, willingness and interest to become doctors, especially when there are so many unknowns in the industry. You have to realize only a very small percentage of the population has the mental capacity to make it in medicine. Only a portion of them may actually be interested in medicine and patient care. Now factor in 4 years of undergrad school, 3 years (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) of med school, all running up $200K or better in student loans...not to mention the obvious fact that the first few years in the profession are brutal with horrible hours and poor pay. Add to that the issues with the government becoming more and more involved with issues that impact compensation, I'd have to think the appeal of the profession goes way down.
It's 4 years for the MD and then another minimum of 3 years for a residency.
Congress controls the number of doctors by refusing to pay for more residency slots. The AMA has nothing to do with it, and I do not see how state governments can do anything unless they want to pay for more residents themselves.
The AMA supports more funding for graduate medical education:
Can you provide a source that shows how many medical students in US schools are from other countries?
Graduates are still predominantly white, though about half male and half female.
What specialty is your wife's hospital looking for and how much is it willing to pay? Is it a small rural facility or in an urban area?
I agree that the country is being sold a bill of goods about people with less education being able to provide care that is "just as good" as a physician. Midlevel providers can do well seeing uncomplicated patients with no new problems who are on maintenance medications. They should not be seeing complicated cases and those with as yet undiagnosed problems and they should not be working without physician supervision. Many of them really do not understand how much they do not know.
Thank you. Somebody actually has some knowledge about this topic instead of the supreme ignorance spouted previously.
Mid-levels will pick up the slack with NP and PA for primary care and some specialty care services... They are okay for basic stuff and doing whatever the doctor tells them... Their depth of knowledge is very superficial and I wouldn't trust them with anything that wasn't outright obvious... I don't really buy the doctor shortage, are there shortages, yes but it's typically in places where nobody wants to live or too low of a population to remain busy or even for specialist that are purposely graduated in small numbers... The new healthcare that Obama is trying to make is one where you suck it up and don't see a doctor for most of your issues... That is government medicine and the only way single payer can exist, where most people don't actual get care for a good number of their medical problems... Low volume leads to less doctors, low pay leads to less intelligent doctors... I am seeing more and more of textbook doctors... I do this because the textbook says so and then they forget to think...
That is not "government medicine" it is "university medicine." Universities are teaching med students that it is all about testing and prevention. Doesn't matter what accent a young doctor has, they've all been taught to practice in a different way nowadays. And of course this started way before Obamacare.
We'd all love an older, well-spoken, doting primary physician to explain everything to us and offer caring advice, but times are a changing as always.
So you don't see the efficiency and value of an electronic healthcare record compared to a hard copy? Early on the Bush Administration announced the goal of eliminating most handwritten clinical data by 2010. In 2004, Bush announced the creation of a government over site office to make Electronic a Healthcare Records ( EHR) available to most Americans. Since 2006, government has been certifying products to effect EHR objectives.
Obama followed through with financial incentives to encourage millions of healthcare providers to eliminate the paper and get with the program.
I seriously cannot imagine a medical school student today who would seek to practice medicine in a hard copy enviornment. Seems to me that most of today's medical school students seek a better work- life balance than many of their predecessors did. They are also disinclined to make the huge personal investment in maintaining a state of the Art environment. Seems to me, most who are passionate and competent about practicing medicine are not necessarily inclined to operate a righ risk business model.
As it relates to the young hot shots.... It's all about higher and better use of the talent which in some cases probably leaves some patients with unmet emotional needs , longing for the days when more doctors took the time to get to know their patients.
Seriously. I have yet to meet any resident who would rather use hard copy than EMR.
The problem is finding people with both the ability, willingness and interest to become doctors, especially when there are so many unknowns in the industry. You have to realize only a very small percentage of the population has the mental capacity to make it in medicine. Only a portion of them may actually be interested in medicine and patient care. Now factor in 4 years of undergrad school, 3 years (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) of med school, all running up $200K or better in student loans...not to mention the obvious fact that the first few years in the profession are brutal with horrible hours and poor pay. Add to that the issues with the government becoming more and more involved with issues that impact compensation, I'd have to think the appeal of the profession goes way down.
Is that correct though? I know the bar is set high to filter out those with lower academic ability, but is that the same as saying only a small percentage have the mental capacity to make it in medicine?
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