Cutting back hours instead of retiring?

That really isn’t a solution. Overhead expenses from malpractice insurance premiums aren’t generally scalable/ratable for part-timers.

This is a problem of politicians who promise what they can’t deliver and the complacent public who think themselves entitled to private service without feeling either the responsibility to pay for their consumption by their own funds or through the taxes they would have to pay.

Asking the doctor to give up retirement so other retired folks can enjoy theirs while burdening that same doctor with higher overhead is just not reasonable.

Americans can just get used to scarcity, or decide that fair pay and some necessary limitations to covered services are something that we can live with as a society.

That is a public issue and problem, and it is a moral and public policy problem. It is not a doctor problem.

Cutting back on office hours?! Might as well go golfing instead of practicing medicine at all. The overhead will not be reduced proportionunately.

It’s not difficult to understand why medical students, residents & new MDs are not becoming FPs: There’s no money in it! Education costs money! We all have compassion for our fellow man & patients, but let’s face it we want to be compensated for our time and money put into becoming medical providers.

The medical profession is one of the only vocations where services are provided for & charged, but the recipients (insured or otherwise) do not pay the charges billed for that service. An example is an office visit is $100, the insurance company pays only $56…that’s a mere 56% of the billed service & Government payers are worse. You can’t make a decent living when you get that little of reimbursement for services. You have costs associated with providing that service. You can’t tell the electric company that you are only going to pay 56% of your light bill or your landlord that you are only going to pay 56% of your lease. It’s absurd that insurance companies & Government payers think that we should be working for 56 cents on the dollar. The answer is not seeing more patients for less pay, it’s getting paid fair market value for the services provided.

Non-medical example: you take your car to get it fixed, the shop tells you it’s $1,000 for your car’s repair bill. You tell them you’ll give them $560. They’ll tell you, “we’ll be holding your car until you deliver the other $440. They will not settle for being under paid & the medical profession shouldn’t either.

The public say that Doctors over charge & that’s why the Government & insurance companies don’t pay the complete bill, “because doctors over charge”. That’s NOT the case. Even if a fair market bill for $100 was lowered to the insurance payment bill of $56, they’d still only pay 56% of that, so doctors would still be in a hole & it’d be an even deeper one.

Government regulation needs to enforce medical payments for what is billed.