#1 Dinosaur bluntly critiques the exploding hospitalist movement, likening them to the subprime mortgage meltdown.
Most hospitals run their programs at a loss, with the hope that hospitalists will lower the costs of inpatient care. The nationwide data is inconsistent at best, but thus far, most hospitals are willing to pay the premium for cost savings down the road.
Will the less-leader economics of hospitalist medicine eventually collapse?
Look at the housing market. It took decades, but because of the fundamentals of subprime lending, it had to happen. You cannot go on indefinitely spending more money than you make.
Although the jury may still be out on field’s future, the current environment is nothing short of lucrative:
“Physicians want to work as a hospitalist . . . but those data tell me that there are doctors who want to get one or two years of experience in a group, then become a free agent. They’ll go down the street and say, ‘I’m a hospitalist with two years of experience, so I want a salary of $249,000 and a $25,000 signing bonus because there’s no one else out there like me.’”
topics: hospitalist, hospital
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- Hospitalists: The last true internal medicine physicians?
- Should hospitalists control hospital beds?
- Most hospitalists are good, but some, like these ones, aren’t
- Hospitalists: Good in theory
- Hospitalists are here to stay, or look how ER physicians are thriving
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{ 3 comments }
No different then hospitals owning primary care practices. They are loss leaders also. So when is the financial bubble going to pop on hospitals supporting fp physicians going to pop. You pcp’s don’t look so hot in green.
The Answer Is Yes
The hospitals are screwed. They depend upon BCBS and the commercial payers to make up for the losses they incur with Medicaid and many of the Medicare patients. At the same time they’re bound by incredible layers of regulation that require armies of administrators.
As they are slowly strangled by a sinking economy and CMS cost cutting measures, they’ll be forced to cut back or stop subsidizing their primary care and hospitalist practices.
One possible outcome will be the feds nationalizing hospital systems that are too important to fail. Happy will become an employee of a VA like federal hospital system.
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