• bhmnscmm@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Did you finish reading the article? Here’s a quote from it:

    “People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”

    There is certainly too much money in American heathcare, but doctors are a pretty small part of the problem.

    • CMLVI@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      They didn’t. If you go to the hospital, and are charged $12k for a 3 day stay, $20k for an MRI, and $1.5k for general medicine, Dr’s working for free would reduce your costs from $33.5k to just under $31k.

      This is like having a massive bleed from an artery on your leg, but you put a bandaid on a scrape on your arm instead.

      • sadreality@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Mostly true although I am not sure if this ratio would hold tho: 33.5k to just under $31k. Labor is never such a small cost of any service fee.

        • CMLVI@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          That only accounts for physician labor, not other labor involved. Nurses, administrators, other operational labor that isn’t a Dr.

          But the point of contention was Dr salary, not overall labor costs with healthcare, so it shouldn’t necessarily be relevant to this particular conversation. I’m sure there are plenty of people who also take issue with the legion of administrators insurance companies pay to handle visits and services, as well as the number of people hospitals pay to try to claw money out of them as well. They provide nothing to the healthcare service, and exist only to try to keep/gain as much funding as possible. You don’t have less cancer because Tom at BCBS was able to deny the Tylenol they gave you two months ago.