I am not sure why ppl keep posting about cardiologists making 500k . I have been in practice several years - pay is more like 270k which is still good but nowhere near 500k...invasive but noninterventional salary, in a high tax state (but not otherwise that high cost of livignin my area). The reason for reimbursement costs is not enough $ in the system, to pay what was paid in the past. Nobody cares that you feel entitled to X salary or that I trained for 12 years to do this (counting med school, residency, research fellowhsip, fellowhsip, but not counting undergrad). The politicians don't care. Most patients don't care. The primary care docs, who already got hacked and screwed years ago, don't care. The nurses unions don't care- they will still scream and sue and strike and do whatever they need to do to preserve the 100k+ salaries that they have. My fiancee is a board certified subspecialist who does medical research and some patient care and is trying to save ppl from death from cancer. there are nurses on the oncology ward making 140k, which is orders of magnitude more than his salary b/c nobody gets paid to do medical research unless you are an endowed faculty member. What people "should" morally get paid doesn't have much to do what they *are* paid in medicine. I don't have a problem with the salary I am paid but I do think that people like CT surgeons, and interventionalists doing high risk procedures, should be paid a LOT. Brain surgeons shoudl be paid A LOT. I'm sorry, but for the liability risk, the mental and emotional distress, and the long years of trainign and the critical nature of what they do, these people need to be paid. And we should think about what else we can do to decrease costs in the system besides cutting doctor reimbursements more. We have RN's and nuclear med techs at the hospital who make 90 k , 100k+, and I'm not talking about in SF or Manhattan. So doctors are not the only ones being paid and increasing the costs in the entire medical system. We are just some of the easiest targets.
