I would certainly blame the doctors here for being complicit in such a system, but it’s clearly one designed to produce this outcome.
Let’s do the math.
Average physician salary in the USA is just under 200k a year. It’s not stated, but I suspect this is after overheads.
Overheads are huge. You’re talking renting a room, licencing fees, a shared secretary, and whoever does your accounts given the complexity of claims in the USA.
Okay, so somebody earned 420k doing 9088 of these insurance claims
So that’s about 46 US per person you see. Before tax and before overheads.
Now don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that to people on average salaries this sounds like quite a lot. But compared to what a physician could be earning? The cost of seeing a gp without insurance is 2 to 5 times that. An insurance payout would be at LEAST double.
From my own experience working in the slightly different but not entirely incomparable Australian system, you’d probably lose money on overheads if you saw someone less frequently than every 20 minutes at that pay.
It’s telling that the “salaried” doctors see someone at a far slower rate, probably don’t pay overheads given they’re government employees, and earn 150k, below average for the profession. And if they were private individuals working at the same rate? 130k. Before costs.
So - you’ve got a system that pays so far below market rate that it requires substandard work. So they get substandard work. And the only people willing to do the work are doctors nobody else will hire.
If you were reputable but just as willing to sell out, you could earn far better, far easier money writing medical reports for insurers. I don’t know the rate in the USA but over here you’d be looking at figures starting in the high hundreds to the low thousands for a specialist report.
