Medicaid only salary?

[Crimson16]

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I've been reading a lot of articles about how medicaid pays substantially less then medicare or private insurance, often forcing doctors to cut back on the number of medicaid patients relative to those with private insurance in their practice or to make up for it in volume of patients they see. I was wondering, how much could a pediatrician serving an underserved community (say innercity) make if they only saw patients with medicaid and had a typical caseload. There have been some forum posts of people stating that due to the large debt load that it wouldn't be feasible to even go into the field because of the poor reimbursement rate. If anyway is experience in the field or knows what they are talking about I'd love to here it.

 

[Bernardo_11]

Greeting Crimson, if you have strong aspirations to helped any of the underserved communities, you might want to look into working at a Public Health center. It would be very difficult to do a private practice based on Medicaid patients alone. Public health centers help fill that gap thorugh obtaining grants to keep the center running. They also pay a pretty decent salary as well. I've seen salaries like 125K with full benefits, all outpatient work, no weekend call. On top of that if, the site is part of the National Health Service Corps, you have the potential of getting 60K towards your student loans for two years of full-time work (This on top of the salary the center is already paying you). If you like your site so much, you can stay an additional year for another 35K. Put in a good 4-7 years, you could potentially have your loans pretty much paid off.

Check out this site, http://nhsc.hrsa.gov/. See if the eligible sites are in the community you wish to serve. This is definitely a better way to it vs the private practice route.

Nardo

 

[WestcoastMedicine]

You can always do academics. You are a salaried employee, dont have to worry AS MUCH about overhead and the other business aspects. If you make payments on your loans for 120 months while working at a nonprofit(most university hospitals) organization then the balance is forgiven. If you make income based payments as a resident (currently up to 15% AGI, as of 01/2012 will only be a max of 10% AGI) say 400 or so a month that counts towards it, not just when it is in full repayment as an attending(probably paying 2-2.5K a month depending on debt). Say you did a 3 fellowship after 3 years of peds, if you were financially able to pay you would already have 6/10 years completed.

Academics for peds doest pay amazing, but it is not that bad and if you factor in loan forgiveness even better. I found this online, not sure if it is base salary or counting productivity, bonuses for publication etc....

http://www.uic.edu/com/dom/hr/FORM/AAMC.pdf

 

[Crimson16]

You can always do academics. You are a salaried employee, dont have to worry AS MUCH about overhead and the other business aspects. If you make payments on your loans for 120 months while working at a nonprofit(most university hospitals) organization then the balance is forgiven. If you make income based payments as a resident (currently up to 15% AGI, as of 01/2012 will only be a max of 10% AGI) say 400 or so a month that counts towards it, not just when it is in full repayment as an attending(probably paying 2-2.5K a month depending on debt). Say you did a 3 fellowship after 3 years of peds, if you were financially able to pay you would already have 6/10 years completed.

Academics for peds doest pay amazing, but it is not that bad and if you factor in loan forgiveness even better. I found this online, not sure if it is base salary or counting productivity, bonuses for publication etc....

http://www.uic.edu/com/dom/hr/FORM/AAMC.pdf

Thanks a lot for that information. I'm still a WAYS off from getting to the point where I have to make those kinds of decisions, but just in general it is still fascinating information.