Doctors Complain About How Terrible They Have It
An essay in the NY times explains how terrible life is for doctors. Reimbursement is down, more time is spent arguing with managed care companies, there are more restrictions on the what they can prescribe, etc, etc.
Now I understand that primary care is in crisis, but overall physicians' salaries in the last couple of years have gone up, and the first doctor in the article is a cardiologist. Cardiologists, as this salary survey suggests, tend to make more than double what a primary care doc gets. And of course, fewer doctors are primary care only now, and more are specialists (who make more money!). But whether or not physicians are getting paid less than they were, their perception surely is that that's the case.
I am surprised that the burden of operating a practice and the demands of "managed care" are felt to have increased. Most observers would suggest that insurers have, since the days of Len Abramson & US Healthcare in the 1990s, backed off the extremes of medical micro-management. In fact, the most profitable health plan of recent years (Aetna) has bent over backwards to appear to be physician friendly. Whether or not it's just window dressing is less certain.
If a doc living in the 1970s was forced into a 1990s world, I would understand the depression. And the surveys I was part of in the 90s indeed showed dismay at what was happening for them. But we're now more than 10 years on from those times, and (as the politicians say) is it really worse now than it was four or five years ago?
