Interesting post. Maggie Mahar explores the hierarchical, and sometimes abusive, environment that pervades surgical training. Will it change?
Not likely, as long as payments continue to be tilted towards surgical procedures. Surgeons are the main profit drivers for hospitals, and subsequently, yield positions of significant power.
Especially when financial times are tough, hospitals will continue to appease surgeons, which makes changing their training environment difficult.
Related posts:
- Is the economy giving physicians the upper hand in hospital negotiations?
- Work-hour restrictions in surgery?
- Does a checklist before surgery really save lives?
- Is trauma surgery a viable specialty?
- Mid-levels for primary care, but not for surgery?
- My take: Health jobs, geriatrics, hospital employment
- Is general surgery the primary care of specialties?
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It’s tiring to hear that surgeons get paid too much. I, as a urologist, can tell you surgery is a money loser. One can make more money in the office seeing patients. Surgeons
cannot do nearly as many procedures as a radiologist or a GI doc or an
ENT. As I see it, general surgery is in the most trouble. Not only is it the most difficult field–in terms of sick patients, but surgeons aren’t compensated well enough. It’s hard to understand how it makes sense that gastroenterologists typically make a lot more money. This will only lead to the shortage of quality surgical care in the future.
Ohh please. If you want to talk about the undercompensation of general surgeons, then we are on the same page. HOWEVER, unless you are seeing mainly medicare/medicaid patient’s urologists in general do very well for themselves. Especially when you look at the fact that most community urologists turf the complicated money losing procedures (nephrectomies) to academic centers while keeping the prostate biopsies and cystos for themselves. Gastro does so well very simply because they can do alot of procedures in a relatively short period of time. Medicare is well aware of this and I would lay odds will be ratcheting down on them in the next few years. If you notice, medicare picks on a different field every year. First it was oncology, then rads, GI will have it’s turn. Agreed that general surgeons are getting screwed, but so are general internists.
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