Med, Thanks for the consideration of my post.
1. I'm aware that physician compensation is going to be on a downward trend and I acknowledge healthcare costs are unsustainable at this time. My point was simply that other things should be looked at long before physicians put themselves on the chopping block. There's so much that could be done with tort reform and other optimizations.
As far as being entitled goes, I expect to be able to pay my loans and still be able to afford a decent living when I'm done with school/residency. I could honestly never put this much effort into something I didn't expect to provide for myself and family. I think that's fair.
2. I was trying to say that I don't think that doctors should have their standard of living chipped away at just to cover for people that chose to spend all their going out on the town instead of paying for insurance. How many of the uninsured are healthy young people that don't think they need insurance? How many of the 45,000 that dawg talks about were actually unable to afford insurance? That's what I primarily meant by "bad decisions," among other things like smoking/drug use, etc.
I'm covered by two insurance companies right now (one is paid for 100% by employer, non-union), so I know it's not exceptionally hard to get basic insurance if you're willing to put in the effort. Neither my wife or I are working jobs that are intellectually demanding (I can't wait for August.) or jobs that require a narrow skill set. We actually have a lot of turn over at our jobs and people just randomly ditch before they get insurance started.
Don't get me wrong though, I think that insurance is getting way too expensive. I just believe that there's a lot of work that needs to be done in other areas before we give up and throw ourselves on the chopping block.
This is excellent. There are also other-interest groups who would also happily dip into physician pay as part of the "solution." If all we end up doing is crying about it, that is what will happen because the industries surrounding health insurance, medical malpractice litigation, malpractice insurance, and big pharm fight a lot harder than physicians to protect their profits. So we're not the only ones thinking about physician pay decreasing, but we are the only ones who have a stake in keeping it reasonable (relative to our educational debt).
You do realize the government actually produces no money right? You do realize the money that they government uses is from taxpayers right? So when you say government pay, you mean government allocating taxes and managing how its spent. Afterall, the money doesn't magically fly across the country and allocate itself. If that's not running things I'm not sure what is.
You do realize that starting a post with "You do realize" makes the rest of what you say much less palatable, right?
You do realize the government actually produces no money right? You do realize the money that they government uses is from taxpayers right? So when you say government pay, you mean government allocating taxes and managing how its spent. Afterall, the money doesn't magically fly across the country and allocate itself. If that's not running things I'm not sure what is.
That's actually not quite true. The government is perfectly capable of producing money,
it just doesn't do so that much because this boosts inflation, thereby devaluing our currency.
Additionally, the government creates and issues bonds (read: loans) which other countries buy. That's how we can keep spending on wars and medicare even with such a huge deficit.
The government *shouldn't* do this much, but printing money and loosening credit is their current strategy for stimulating the economy.
When you combine this with selling bonds to other countries (Glorious Peoples Republic of China), we've really got an interesting shell game going on. From the administrative end, the government looks pretty bad but the financiers may have an interesting idea with these bonds.
As an individual, if you owe the bank a million dollars, they own you. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, you own the bank. If you default it's going to screw them way harder than it screws you. If China wants to keep snatching up our bonds, they're putting themselves in a position where they have an interest in keeping us from collapse. So we can either rely on their support to keep us out of economic apocalypse, or that apocalypse clears our balance sheet.
Best practice? Nah. But we'll see if that works out for us. It would be very hard to believe that there's an earnest plan to service all of that debt.
Currently, Doctors in the private sectors/clinics are paid not by salary, but by the number of patients they see.
Not everywhere. The Mayo Clinic (come at me, bros!) salaries their physicians irrespectively of what they generate in insurance reimbursements. They also happen to be one of the positive deviants in the health care system, in that they provide some of the best care and yield some of the best outcomes without churning up absurdly high costs.
It should be noted that the Arizona and Florida offshoots have not been as successful at managing cost while providing such a high standard of care. So whatever they are doing in Minnesota can't simply be extrapolated to the rest of the nation, but I'm sure there are lessons to be learned.
I quit my full time job to go back to school. I worked as a server through my undergrad, and in a lab at my school. I did community service volunteering and payed for all of my expenses out of pocket, including my tuition. I did not have health insurance for five years while doing this. I recieved no assistance at all from the government. Why should others get free healthcare when they don't do anything but waste money, dont take care of themselves, and pop out babies? And if they are entitiled, how come I am was not? This is completey ridiculous and biased. So yea, when I see this crap it does rub me wrong. Of course there are always exceptions, but we encourage this behavior. Why don't they drug test? I drug test to get a job. Why don't college students get help with health insurance? Medical students don't even get free healthcare! How can you justify this?
Dude, I understand your frustration. But no one is trying to justify students getting bent-over by the system while welfare recipients are grandfathered into receiving government aid. In fact, we're all barking up the same tree here. The current system needs to change. How?
Drug-testing people on government aid is not a solution. Every penny you save kicking a drug addict off welfare, you've already spent paying to test everyone else.
Now I'm just confused.
