General Surgery is Getting Fucked Over as Much as Primary Care

When you can make more from stripping veins than you can from taking out half of someone's colon, something is really fucked-up in the system.

General surgery is the primary care/generalist equivalent among surgical specialties. And they're getting fucked over just as bad.

No wonder we're looking at a shortage here too.

Rich Whining Docs Fight...Health Care Implodes

Check out this rant between the ER docs and the sub-specialists.

Where's the love?

(And do they realize that there are docs even further down the economic totem pole for whom it's not a matter of how much you can make, but rather one of staying in business or not!)

Coverage without Access is Meaningless-Gov Crist Proposal Falls Short

Like I've said before, you can expand coverage to win points with your supporters and to get elected.

Medicaid provides coverage. But nobody wants to accept Medicaid...they can't survive if they do.

Nobody is talking about reimbursement rates and how mandated coverage will affect these rates.

Governor Crist's plans are no different.

Arrgh! Fuck the RUC!

More on this bitch of an organization from Kevin, M.D.

Read the full piece on the RUC in Family Practice Management here.

Do you think 5 caths (assuming they are actually necessary) should be equal to 80 99214's?

Don't Doctors Make Too Much Already?

Edwin Leap comments on "How Much Should Doctors Make" in a recent post.

How much should they make?  Just taking the perspective of a primary care physician, it's hard to feel sorry for someone making $130,000 a year, right?

What sucks about this situation is that this income quickly gets spent in paying off school loans, the high costs of malpractice insurance, and all of the other stuff that people deal with.

I've got lots of friends with over $200,000 in student loans.  Some are married to doctors, making the overall educational debt load $400,000.  After school, daycare, mortgage and the other things we all deal with, they are also among the ranks of those living from paycheck-to-paycheck. 

But even then, they seem to do pretty well.  They're far from homeless.  And they've got things that other people don't.

So how much should they make?  How much should anyone make?  Professional athletes, hedge fund managers, recording artists, attorneys?  (Of  course, our culture makes what they have to offer more important than health--can't afford meds but can pay to see a hockey game.)

As Kevin, MD reminds us on his blog, it is true that US physicians make more than physicians in other countries...but so do people in other professions.