Yes.
Are you?
Um, no.
If you asked me beforehand, I would've been shocked the mean is roughly $500K and would've guessed that would be good enough to be in the top 10%.
You've got everybody beat here. Doing...Forensics?
That may be the case. But it's the gold standard by many hospitals nationwide to determine salaries for employed physicians. I'm sure many a pathologist would be satisfied being in the bottom 25th %ile making mid 300's...
So, I'm looking at the MGMA report for 2016 (using 2015 data) right now. Total compensation for Pathology: Anatomic and Clinical is $350K median and $383K mean for all practice types (28 groups/165 practitioners). The Midwest practices in the survey (all 7 of them, accounting for 26 of the 165 practitioners surveyed nationally) do the best regionally, with a median of $451K and a 90%ile of $828K. But that's data from a very small number of practitioners in the Midwest. In contrast, practices in the East have a median of $322K and a 90%ile of $626.
As far as revenue, you are generating at least 450 - 500K depending on location, case & payor mix. If you were an equal partner in pp with your workload being the average, you'd be making upper 300's or more i.e. what your friends in pp said they're at.
The fact that you asked your billing info (depending on whom) after being there close to 3 yrs and haven't gotten feedback is a little uncouth to me. But it doesn't surprise me that academic or employed places would be tight-lipped about this. If you want to find out that info, you don't need to ask anyone in the first place. This can be easily figured out by looking at CMS reimbursements for your area and CPT codes for the cases you sign out, and if you really want to get to down to it, patients' insurance.
I don't think anyone can say if you should be happy other than yourself. Others can only relate their level of satisfaction based on their own personal wants and needs including their family's as well as what their financial goals are. And, no one but yourself can tell you what you should feel your net worth is given the other advantages you spoke of being in your current job. You've already expressed you are happy with your current situation because you've passed on other interviews, haven't looked around for other jobs, and not planning on leaving. Sounds to me like you're mind is pretty much already made up. Having said that, if you're posting on here for the first time to inquire about this, I think it'd be worth testing the waters and at least having a conversation with some of the other places that wanted to interview you the next time it comes up and see what they're offering. You may end up being happier...
If these new jobs offer partnership/income ceilings higher than where your rural job is at, you're only losing out for a couple of years and may even surpass you're total career earnings in the next 5-10 yrs. So, taking a 50-100K pay cut in the short run may not be as bad as it seems...
Disagree entirely with the first part of that statement because it's entirely reliant on the second part: NO ONE making 200k in pathology, who is signing out an appropriate number of cases, is being appropriately compensated because all that money is being siphoned off to someone else. This is the inherent problem with our field--we've accepted the notion that such poor compensation is not only to be expected but appropriate.
LMAO. Again, the source of the problem...some pathologists function as the migrant labor force of medicine...and not because they have no other choice and their families are being ruined by drugs & crime, but because they CHOOSE to for convenience sake...while a whole separate population of equally trained persons has worked diligently to ensure scarcity of product, high demand and low trainee output.
Partially correct because the opportunity cost to reach 200K for a physician in the US is greater than someone in investment banking who reached that same income level in their late 20's with only a four year degree. But a dollar earned by someone making 200K in investment banking or any other field has the same purchasing power as a dollar earned by a physician making that same amount. i.e. a single earner making 200K in the medical field vs a family with a household income of 200K still has to pay the same amount for a 2,000 sq. ft house and a Prius in San Bernadino, CA or whatever city in America they're living in.
That's what he meant
Again, I'm not minimizing the fact that 200k in the grand scheme of life is "good", I'm just saying if you take some utilitarian generic view of your career as a comparison to starving people in Africa, why don't we work for even less --say $100k? $100k is still better off than most. Why not $85k?
exactly.
