A glaring example of how a practice cannot live on Medicare patients alone:
After paying for clinical staff salaries, practice costs and malpractice insurance, a bariatric surgeon who performs nearly 300 laparoscopic gastric bypass procedures on Medicare patients makes just over $71,000 annually””and that’s before taxes, according to a recent report.
That is $20,000 less than the average pharmacist earns in a year, $50,000 less than the average dentist and about the same as the median salary for physician assistants, based on figures from one Web site, www.salary.com.
“Being paid $71,000 for 292 gastric bypasses a year””that’s just not practical,” said study author Atul Madan, MD, director of the bariatric surgery program at UT Medical Group, Inc., in Memphis, Tenn. He presented the study at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Society for Bariatric Surgery.
