Physician Pension Plans

[deringer]

From all I've been seeing, it appears that the future trend in physician employment will be towards the salaried employee. This appears especially true for such specialties as radiology and emergency medicine. Since in the future it is likely that most of us will be salaried employees (even surgeons and FP's), will it be common to see retirement pension plans, or will we need to fend for ourselves as if we were self-employed (meaning only IRA's, no hospital pension plans or matched 401k's)? Anyone know what those pension plans may look like? As a comparison, a University of California employee (technician, professor, etc) that is making $120,000 at age 60 with 30 years service, will be offered a lump sum of $1.38 million in addition to any IRA's the employee may have accrued. This is typical for the business world, does the health care industry support it's employees retirement as well as other industries?

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[pags]

Maybe it is different in California, but, I don't agree with your prediction that physicians are headed for broad based hospital employment, if that's what you mean. Most hospitals I'm familiar with here in NY, are actually cutting physician jobs instead of hiring. Albany Medical Center is actually closing their clinic space and laying off FP's to attract rent money from private physician practices that would subsequently move in. Obviously, an economic move for the cash starved hospital. I would think it is cheaper to contract out than to hire within and pay all those costly hospital benefits. Thus, to touch on your argument, future physicians will probably have to take more responsibility to plan their own retirement funding and rely less on their hospital employer.

 

[deringer]

I agree that some specialities, like FP, usually contain more self-employed physicians than salaried physicians, but the reverse is true for other specialties (like radiology and EM). To quote the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

"Unlike their predecessors, newly trained physicians face radically different choices of where and how to practice. New physicians are much less likely to enter solo practice and more likely to take salaried jobs in group medical practices, clinics, and integrated healthcare systems."

Also:

"Physicians and surgeons held about 598,000 jobs in 2000. About 7 out of 10 were in office-based practice and about 2 out of 10 were employed by hospitals. "