Which is why medical students are staying away in droves:
Medical students, burdened with $200,000 in debt are voting with their wallets, choosing gastroenterology with it’s $200 13.5 minute colonscopies, or cardiology, with it’s unlimited access to procedures (echo, ekg, cath, stress test, pacers, ICD’s and on and on). Money is currently being made by procedures,not cognition. And there is no relief in site. In fact, Congress is proposing dropping ALL physician payments, across the board by 35% plus in the next 5 years. Primary care, which has the tightest margins to start with , is getting decimated. Procedural medicine has a built in buffer, but given time, the current system will shut them down too.
And why hospitalist medicine is playing the system to perfection.
Related posts:
- Medical procedures: "Increasing revenue by doing very little"
- Where’s the money to better pay primary care doctors going to come from?
- Medical students avoiding primary care, is it more than money?
- A challenge to DO’s
- Choosing a specialty: For love or money
- Teaching medical procedures to interns and residents
- Procedures becoming obsolete for internal medicine?
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