Tag: Physician Income Disparity

Physician Incomes 2009-10

Brian Klepper

This table was published in Practice Link, a physician recruiting magazine, and I calculated the relative value of the offers by specialty, by low, medium and high, and then sorted for the medium. See below for how they turned out.

At current medium offer rates – without considering benefits or production bonuses, the average family doc can expect to earn around $10 million less than an invasive cardiologist or an orthopedic surgeon over the course of a 30 year career.

America Needs Different Doctors, Not More Doctors

Merrill Goozner

Posted 11/10/11 on Gooz News

Matt Yglesias at Think Progress took a look at some OECD data comparing U.S. physicians to their international counterparts and concluded we need more doctors. The evidence? There’s only 2.4 practicing physicians per 1,000 population in the U.S., second lowest in the OECD and somewhat below the 3.0 median (the range is from 2.2 physicians per 1,000 population in Japan to 4.0 in Norway). At the same time, the average U.S. medical consumer sees a physician only 3.9 times a year compared to the 6.3 OECD median. Yes, we pay a lot for health services including physician services (he reprints a chart showing average pay for U.S. physicians, whether highly paid orthopedic surgeons or relatively poorly paid primary care docs, that shows they are the highest paid among six well-off OECD countries). But his conclusion that America therefore needs more docs is off the mark.