3 ms·
"Professional Extenders" are everywhere, and it hasn't caused anything to become cheaper. If you show up at an urgent care, just expect that you will be treate
by just1nn 9y ago
"Professional Extenders" are everywhere, and it hasn't caused anything to become cheaper. If you show up at an urgent care, just expect that you will be treated by a LPN and a PA or a NP. A Family Practice physician's salary is about comparable to a Sr. Engineer at many tech companies (~160k), and they can have significant malpractice insurance overhead and insane hours. A PA or NP still makes 6 figures, so the "savings" just aren't there.
If you've ever had to attend something like Physical Therapy, you'll see the actual PT (a MS/Doctorate level professional aka DPT) about twice. Once for an eval, and once for a discharge. An "aide" will guide you through all the other exercises, and they make very significantly less than a PT.
The savings are mysteriously gone, even adding lower-salaried professional extenders.
- psergeant 9y ago> “Professional Extenders" are everywhere, and it hasn't caused anything to become cheaper. This needs the caveat of “to American consumers”. The NHS seem to be heavily moving in that direction, and I suspect “cheaper” is no small part of that
- aaavl2821 9y ago"professional extenders" are often "profit extenders", as the supervising physician can enable his / her practice to see more volume and better match revenues and costs (ie have lower cost labor do lower revenue / acuity work). the "savings" from this often end up accruing to the owner of the practice. increasingly this owner is a large hospital system, but they take this delegation a step further, using lower cost primary care as a way to increase volume to higher acuity / reimbursed hospital procedures.