What would the effect of single-payer medicare be on physician incomes?

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Ischemia1032

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I am purely curious as a pre-med who is interested in national healthcare, how would this change things. I would think by cutting out HMOs and insurance companies, and having the government directly control pricing, physicians would make just as much or more since reimbursements are at record lows to my knowledge?

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But expect that salaries would continue to drop. As there is more and more political pressure to provide more and more care without raising taxes, what takes the hit are physician re-imbursements. God forbid they stop providing useless care to octogenarians. Those are death panels... but I digress.

The reason why the VA salaraies are low but not terrible are the fact that private practice pays more. Take out the private payor and there would be no competition.
 
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I highly doubt single payer will happen within the next few decades. Were it to happen, salaries would likely decrease, likely substantially for specialists, but modestly for PCPs.
 
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The reason why the VA salaraies are low but not terrible are the fact that private practice pays more. Take out the private payor and there would be no competition.
Well by law, no government employee's salary can be higher than the president's (currently $400k/year; it was 200k in the 90s). And because of the current political climate, VA salaries have been effectively frozen for a while now.
 
The US healthcare system is the subject of our entire 3rd block for my Population Health/Epidemiology course. The U.S. spends the most money on healthcare compared to all other developed nations, while achieving some of the worst outcomes. If I had to summarize the lesson of the entire block, it is that there is no easy fix.

Or is there?
 
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The US healthcare system is the subject of our entire 3rd block for my Population Health/Epidemiology course. The U.S. spends the most money on healthcare compared to all other developed nations, while achieving some of the worst outcomes. If I had to summarize the lesson of the entire block, it is that there is no easy fix.

Or is there?

The worst outcomes metric is very debatable
 
I am purely curious as a pre-med who is interested in national healthcare, how would this change things. I would think by cutting out HMOs and insurance companies, and having the government directly control pricing, physicians would make just as much or more since reimbursements are at record lows to my knowledge?

Lower.
 
The left loves to be a proponent of a single payer system. But without multiple insurers to compete within the market to provide more comprehensive coverage, what incentive would a single-payer entity have to pay physicians high reimbursements?

The answer: none.

Physicians' pay would continue to drop, and drop. And the long term end result would be broke physicians making sub-100K, and with 300K+ in debt. So, assuming physicians cannot likely pay back massive amounts of debt on low pay, that would cause another semi-finacial crisis when doctors everywhere default on their loans. Not good for the american economy.

One other point/question, though. Why the hell do physicians let insurance companies fully dictate the market and prices for services? What about charging a fee, allowing it to be subsidized by the insurers, and the rest is financed by the patient up to the point that the market can handle it?

My end point: **** a single payer system.

Ill take my capitalism everyday of the week. Tell Bernie to suck it.

This is a bit too inflammatory to be credible. Also, the numbers are made up.
 
Look at the VA which is essentially single payor. Salaries are on the low end, but benefits are good.
But expect that salaries would continue to drop. As there is more and more political pressure to provide more and more care without raising taxes, what takes the hit are physician re-imbursements. God forbid they stop providing useless care to octogenarians. Those are death panels... but I digress.

The reason why the VA salaraies are low but not terrible are the fact that private practice pays more. Take out the private payor and there would be no competition.
I highly doubt single payer will happen within the next few decades. Were it to happen, salaries would likely decrease, likely substantially for specialists, but modestly for PCPs.

This is interesting. I was expecting that physicians that tended uninsured/low-income patients would actually have a salary increase due to increased coverage, while physicians tending to wealthy patients will have a salary decrease. It's surprising to see that regardless of the patient demographics tended to, physician incomes are hit by single payer.
 
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