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>> Doctors are already paid absurd salaries in the US >To put it in context, when I finish all my training, I will owe over $600,000. > It's not the doctors b
by bradleyjg 11y ago
>> Doctors are already paid absurd salaries in the US
>To put it in context, when I finish all my training, I will owe over $600,000.
> It's not the doctors being "paid absurd salaries" that makes medical care in this country expensive. It's lawyers - malpractice insurance can take upwards of 25+% of your income - and it's insurance companies, who have shareholders they are responsible to, and it's hospital administration, whose positions keep multiplying.
It's a red herring. If you compare physician compensation in the UK to the US, the costs of medical education are made up within the first ten years. Yes, even after malpractice insurance. Hospital administrators are also wildly overpaid, but there just aren't as many of them. Physician compensation as compared to foreign doctors, which get the same or better results, is just too large a piece of the pie to brush under the rug by pointing at other problems.
- carbocation 11y agoAs of ~2012, physician compensation was something like 8.5% of healthcare spending in the USA. This means that in the United States, physician compensation is actually a smaller component of healthcare costs than it is in the UK (where it's ~10% of overall cost).
- JamesBarney 11y agoThis is because the U.S spends 2.6 times as much on health care per capita as the united kingdom.
- carbocation 11y agoAnd if you paid physicians $0, the US would still spend about 2.4 times as much on health care per capita as the United Kingdom. In the context of this thread, this is the relevant point.