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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30513 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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My friend Fred says that median real wages for doctors have been going up since 2000 at least. Although $2700/week seems pretty low. What's your source for the claim that they're going down?

Anyway, I don't think we should cut doctors' salaries as such. We should allow more people to become doctors and let the market sort it out.

Yeah that's clearly not accurate data given how far the number is off from the average 300-350 yearly salary range. Zero idea where it's coming from.

The simplest elevator pitch for decline in physician salaries is that medicare reimbursement has been cut every year for 20+ years (something like ~30 percent down from 2000 I think). At the same time inflation has happened. While pay isn't always directly driven by Medicare, private insurance often pegs itself off of Medicare rates.

An alternative is that the raw numbers haven't really gone up for many years (although COVID changed this) but inflation has gone up by a lot.

The numbers are divided by CPI, "Index Dec 1999=100". Multiplying by 175 gets to $245,700/year in 2024 dollars. It's also a median; the mean would be higher.

Hmmm. Something still seems off, I'm not sure I can square that with the pay checks I know about. Also not sure that surgical specialities are doing well enough to raise the average by 100k (given the smaller numbers of them).

Maybe they are including residents in the numbers and its fucking it up somehow? They are technically doctors and actually have had pay gains because at some point living in downtown SF on 50k became completely impossible.

I wonder if there has been a flattening of wages since now doctors are effectively all employees and few are owners.

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