Docs only get 7.3% of the Pie
Physicians are paid 7.3% of our total national health expenditure:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the aggregate median salary for every healthcare provider totals $966,992,011,000.
The ~1 million physicians get paid $262,332,755,000. That’s $262.3 Billion out of a total $3.6 Trillion spent on healthcare in 2019.
Physicians get paid 7.3% of the total amount spent on healthcare.
Wow.
What was more disturbing to me, however, is that 73% goes to non healthcare providers. I wonder who they may be?
This is how we fix healthcare. Get rid of 90% of the administrators as a start.
You can read more about what Brennen Hodge is doing here.
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Chris Tomlinson writes a column for the Houston Chronicle (Chron.com). His Monday (1/27) column said that doctors wages w rose 16.1 percent from 2013 to 2017 while wages rose 5.2%. He also wrote big pharma gets a 17.3% RETURN knocks hospital… He concluded “Health care is a hugely profitable business in the US.”
Let’s start with 7-figure nonprofit CEOs. In my home base, that would be at least 3-4 Harvard teaching hospitals, at least one of whom was an utter mediocrity as a Cardiology fellow. (I don’t know any practicing cardiologists or academics who make anything close for a 60+ hour work week. I sure as hell didn’t!)
Ah, well. You are looking for expertise in medicine to resemble Expertise in McMedicine. ™ The slots are for the self-sustaining little club and their legacy children. I was around when one legacy surgeon and namesake of Big Poppa ran a liter and a half of fluid into the pleural space through a “central line catheter” which had exited the central vasculature. Oopsy. Nevermind. I think he was Chief Resident of Surgery shortly afterward. I expect he decreased the excess population in Boston somewhat. If people DO NOT VALUE something, it IS NOT SELECTED FOR. Simple evolution. Since people have encouraged the inflation of measurements, values and principles to embrace everything of dubious quality, one may chat about and desire quality, but it is a bogus currency, a Weimar Mark. I gave my son a Billion Marks some time ago. That was a train ticket’s price, it said so right on the front. If nothing is worth anything, than everything is equal.
Yet bureaucrats, insurance CEO’s, patient advocates, economists, do gooder advocates, academics, AND PATIENTS will all continue to bitch about “rich doctors” stealing them blind.