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There has, from time to time, been some discussion concerning doctor salaries. I don't personally care all that much about this. They're highly-trained professionals in an in-demand field, and doctor salaries probably aren't the main driver of overall healthcare costs.
Nevertheless, there's often some debate over what the numbers actually look like. I was just linked to this tweet in one of my econ link aggregators. (Yay, built-in browser translation!)
Their claim is that 84% of American physicians are in the top 10% of incomes, and 26% of American physicians are in the top 1%. Their paper makes comparisons to other countries. They also broke it down into primary care vs. specialists.
So, at least this is one snapshot view of the actual distribution of doctor salaries, which I hadn't really seen before in these discussions. Assuming, of course, that their methodology is sound, which I'm not qualified to assess.
George Halvorson is the best person I know to consult on the state of the healthcare industry today. One of the major cost drivers for things is simply ordinary price inflation, believe it or not.
Whenever I think of the associated costs in healthcare, the complexities surrounding it are so daunting that it always brings me back to 2016 when Hillary and Bernie were running for the democratic ticket and why there’s so much bad data on this.
Back when Bernie Sanders was running for president, I don’t know how many people remember this but there was an infamous “Yale” study that come out during that period, which was a paper that supposedly showed how his plan could effectively nationalize large portions of healthcare as a whole, making things cheaper and more efficient for everybody.
Then I did a little bit of digging, and it became very clear to me that nobody read beyond the headline. Go into any hospital and walk into the insurance department and ask the person there, “What would happen to your hospital if you were reimbursed only at the Medicare rates?” The answer is always “Oh that’s simple. We would have to shutdown the hospital.
The author of that study simply took the Medicare reimbursement rates and applied them across the entire healthcare industry as a whole, which is grossly inaccurate because private insurance cross subsidizes Medicare to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each year. This goes away under Medicare for all and the Yale study simply ignored that fact.
"The program in this country with the lowest health care prices happens to be one where there's a very high percentage of government involvement. That's Medicaid. So, we do know where we have low prices in our health care system. And that would argue that we need more government involvement. "
-A comment from a presumably intelligent healthcare professor on a recent healthcare podcast
Everyone always talks about "Medicare for all", but "Medicaid for all" is probably more achievable: people with existing insurance options probably aren't going to drop it en masse because it's definitely a downgrade in provider selection (read: quality) and availability. Heck, more than half of Medicare beneficiaries now opt to use those dastardly insurance companies as intermediaries rather than traditional Medicare.
But I haven't tried to figure out the costs of doing this, this post is mostly an observation that the two nominally-similar services have different valences with the nation and politicians.
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