Good insight here on how physicians are paid...and how they are under the magnifying glass with every procedure they recommend from both an HMO and now Medicare. BD
“I don’t have a view on whether doctors take home too much money or not enough money,” Dr. Bach said. “The problem is the way they earn their money. They have to do stuff. They have to do procedures.”
Primary care doctors and pediatricians, who rarely perform complex procedures, make less than specialists. They are attracting a declining percentage of medical students, and some states are facing a shortage of primary care doctors.
Doctors are also paid whether the procedures they perform go well or badly, Dr. Bach said, and whether they are crucial to a patient’s health or not..
“Almost all expenditures pass through the pen of a doctor,” he said. So a doctor may decide to perform a test that costs a total of $4,000 in order to make $800 for himself — when a cheaper test might work equally well. “This is a highly inefficient way to pay doctors,” Dr. Bach said.
Private insurers like H.M.O.’s are more aggressive than Medicare in second-guessing physicians’ clinical decisions, and they will refuse to pay for imaging scans or other expensive new procedures.
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