never said it was without charge, i said my mother did not pay for almost anything. the very next post (since we cannot edit) i posted that i had not seen the total cost of the operations.
other people paying for things is the entire point of insurance btw…pooling resources together etc
So what then? Plenty of people in the US get operations without paying anything as well. Somebody is paying for it though.
well for one thing there was no need to fight with the insurance company to see what was covered and what was not, nor was there the additional stress of worrying about how to pay or if the family kid would need to create a lemonade stand to pay for the surgery. nope she was able to focus on the healing aspect with no stress. that is not minor.
I can only guess why our doctors and nurses are paid more. My guess is that
-our K-12 school system sucks at teaching math and science and therefore
The last two points are definites. One article I read said the big difference is we see specialists too often.
Another said our doctors and hospitals buy too much equipment and pay too much for it.
So if there is tort reform your believe that doctors and hospitals will lower their charges making healthcare more affordable?
First of all healthcare is one of the only industries in our country where consumers do not shop based upon price. Doctors/hospitals don’t advertise their billed charges. They would have no reason to lower their charges.
The major problem with our health care system is using health insurance as the main provider which causes customers not to shop for best price. It’s not really insurance. it’s 3rd party payer. But being sue happy doesn’t help either.
Overpaid?
So, at minimum, you’re talking 4 years undergrad, 4 years medical school, and 3-6 years of residency. Assuming you start undergrad at 18, you’ll be about 30 before you start to be “overpaid.”
And once you start being “overpaid” you get to start paying back your student loans, which average $200,000. A family practice physician probably won’t make than in total yearly compensation.
Here are a few examples of average student debt by school.
You’ll work up to 80 hours a week as a resident and then average 60 hours a week after that.
You get to work a high stress job with the highest suicide rate of any profession.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/896257
To top it off, we’re expecting a shortage of 100,000 doctors by 2030.
So, before you state that doctors are “overpaid,” maybe you should consider the work, stress, importance and need of physicians. If you want a smart, hardworking, proficient doctor you’re going to have to pay for it. It’s already getting to the point that the people you’d want to become a doctor say “screw it” when they look at what’s involved. If you decide to pay them less, it’ll get even worse.
Wrong.
The German gov’t pays German doctors and hospitals ~$4,000 per German and in return those doctors and hospitals provide something like universal HC.
Same thing in Denmark, Canada etc. etc…
In the US the US government also spends ~$4,000 per citizen, but here, doctors and hospitals charge more so that $4,000 paid per citizen provides healthcare for only the FRACTION of Americans who get their HC via medicaid, medicare etc…
Even before private insurance (some for profit, some not) enters the picture we Americans are already sending $4,000 per American to our government. But our doctors and hospitals charge more so, all over the developed world, $4,000 per citizen pays all the costs for universal care. Here that same amount paid in only scratches the surface.
AND unlike public dole government employees Doctors are well into their career before they can begin saving one dime for retirement. About the time they start making enough money to catch up these filthy moochers want to tax the crap out of them.
Certainly paid more than their counterparts. Keep in mind, I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with supply and demand driving doctor and nurse salaries up.
In the 1940s, and 50s, and 60s, when our schools were good at teaching math and science we had a surplus of doctors and nurses and used to send them overseas in Peace Corp type programs, as medical missionaries etc…
Now, our schools suck at teaching math and science and we import doctors abd nurses from third world countries.
We “import” doctors from other countries because they work hard and know their job. In many cases they also have the advantage of coming here without the crushing debt most American doctors have. I’d say that when looking for a doctor, competence and skill should trump country of origin.
If you want to know why US healthcare is so expensive, I’d ask you to look at two areas. Administrative costs and drug prices.
In the US, because of our horrid billing, coding and negotiated reimbursement system, 25% of all health care dollars are spent on non-clinical administrative work. In the UK, it’s 16% and in Canada it’s 12%. Americans, per capita in 2013 (5 year old data), spent about $1000. In Canada this was about $750 and $400 in the UK. Our drug prices are higher across the board, especially non-generics.
Lastly, and more difficult to quantify, is the hospital emphasis on patient satisfaction rather than outcome. Hospital systems and administrators are more concerned with how happy a patient was with their “healthcare experience” than whether they had a good result. This leads to waste in diagnostic studies, treatment, and redundancy. Some of these subjective patient scores are now being tied to reimbursement which is insane.
Since I can’t edit, there was supposed to be an “on prescription drugs” at the end of that sentence.
But it fits right in. Here are the salaries, by country for certified IT professionals.
Here are the salaries for biologists.
Source1:
http://certmag.com/salary-survey-2008/
Source2
http://www.lse.ac.uk/LSEHealthAndSocialCare/pdf/eurohealth/VOL17No1/Stubnya.pdf
It does not take an expert on the subject to be able to clearly see that the number of new graduate nurses is continually falling and that ever fewer of those who have graduated are actually working in the health service. Parallel to this is the dra- matic increase in the proportion of those emigrating, quitting the profession and retiring. In other words, too few are entering the system and very many are leaving, which not only makes it likely, but rather it is a solid certainty, that the neg- ative trend apparent in the nursing profession will – without some form of intervention – continue.
Yeah. It looks like the nursing situation in Hungary is wonderful.
You want highly trained people to go into an important stressful career? You need to pay them.
Have some cheese with your whine.
The training the stress etc. (Boo Hoo), the hours, are the same everywhere. In fact foreigners come here to put up with the long long long days and get US licenses and US salaries.
What remains is that when every German pay their gov’t $4,000 the Germans get universal care. Ditto in the UK, France, Denmark, Canada etc. etc., but Americans pay the American gov’t $4,000 a person and that covers only medicaid, medicare, VA etc… Private insurance has not even entered the equation and we pay for partial healthcare what they pay for universal healthcare.
Their governments pay $4,000 per citizen and get umiversal care. Our government pays $4,000 per citizen and gets only medicaid, medicare, VA etc…
Our hospitals charge more.
Our Doctors charge more.
Our Nurses charge more.
People come from around the world to go through the long hours, the stress, etc. and accept the lion-sized salaries we pay.
I’ve yet to find a provider that would not accept the same or less in cash than they get from heir in network insurers.
On the other hand, as I noted previously the US pays top dollar for all math and science professionals. Our nurses and doctors are paid more just as our IT professionals and biologists are. (We also import those.)
Supply and demand says the higher salaries would seem to make sense.
US students rank poorly in math and science on the PISA:
US students rank poorly in math and science on the TIMSS
I have a friend here locally that is 22 days from finishing her residency as a GP. She’s pretty gifted and worked hard graduating college in 3 years.
In total from the day she entered college to the end of her residency she’ll have about 11 years of post HS education.
Even with her husband working his butt off to support her through it all she’ll start her practice with over 200k in debt.
Fortunately being pretty gifted she’ll be staying with the same practice she did her residency in and making a pretty decent salary but they fully expect it will be 10 more years before the debt is paid.
Most doctors really don’t start making any real money till they hit around forty.
