There are of course, many reasons to be saddened by these types of conservative swine. Adding to the list for me is that many of these states are geographically beautiful, rolling hills and mountains, lush countryside and so tainted by conservatism I choose to avoid them. I refuse to spend time or money in such toxic places. I wish America was a free country, there would be so much to visit and enjoy.
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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.
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Former ChatTN resident speaking up. State government is rife with corruption–witness the Pilot scandal which probably funded a gubernatorial campaign. The state is proud of poor John Scopes being banished across the county line.
The bitter truth is that these doctors probably are approving opiate addicts, drunks, and fakers while denying cancer patients and truly disabled survivors of toxic jobs.
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I’m pretty sure that figure is net, not gross. Physicians who are salaried would compare 1:1 to the insurance claim income. Physicians who have their own practice (increasingly rare) often structure it as a business and pay themselves a salary (also comparable to earnings from the insurance scam income).
My belief that evil, powerful people read these (along with dystopian sci-fi classics) and decided to use them as a manual grows stronger every year.
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In fairness to the state, this is essentially the same kind of shit insurers were pulling for decades because profits are more important than, you know, health.
Of course, in a better world, the public sector would be protecting the people instead of pulling the wrongful crap the carriers pull. But we’re not that kind of people that require our leaders to do anything more than exploit us for the enrichment of special interests at our expense or, in this case, health.
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