Gender Pay Gap for Doctors
The title of the article states That pesky gender pay gap exists for doctors too. Of course, this is a MSNBC site and there is a left leaning agenda. I really try to present both political sides here at authenticmedicine.com. You will see that I use resources from both agendas on this website. As many times that I use Wall Street Journal articles I will also use NYT or MSNBC or USA Today articles. But today’s reference piece is particularly misleading. The article talks about physician researchers. Researchers! It has nothing to do with the doctors who actually PRACTICE medicine. Regular physicians bill for what they do. This is usually in increments of relative value units. We have to use very special coding system to send to the insurers to get paid for our services. Any differences that male and female doctors get paid is due to them billing less because they did less work. End of story. You can debate that insurers should pay more for cognitive medicine or time spent with the patient, etc. but it doesn’t change the facts.
As far as researchers go, who knows if the methodology of this study is valid? The lead author, Reshma Jagsi, is an associate professor and physician researcher at the University of Michigan Health System. That fact that she is the one to “uncover” the possibility that income inequality exists in her own profession seems a little bit of a conflict of interest. Isn’t that why we don’t regard Big Pharma research about their own drug to be so important?
Pesky? Where does this author got off invoking the name of Johnny (“The Needle”) Pesky? Oh… I guess I should read the entire article before further commentary.
The title alone makes it sound like those clinicians who are “hands on” are the ones involved, when the article indicates it is more likely the “non-touchers” who are either corporate employees or those whose budget (including personal remuneration) is based on a monetary grant for an accepted research proposal and results (“some of my Wistar rats developed rare tumors when fed various amounts of THEIR drug but less so with the exciting new pharmaceutical discovery developed by the company for which I must disclose financial interest because of those pesky disclosure laws”).
. Bless their hearts….
The entire gender pay gap thing is so old. First of all, it is illegal to pay someone different because of gender. Also, any study that shows a pay inequality is shouted from the rooftops when the details and validity of the study itself are ignored.
I’m a centrist kind of guy but MSNBC really sucks. Maybe too much Al Sharpton. Equally educated, trained and busy XX and XY make the same money.