truthseeker1

Physicians don’t control the supply of physicians. The federal govt funds residency slots so they indirectly controls the supply.

Medicine is a pretty high stakes career. You mess up and people can die. In radiology, we are expected to be near perfect (not miss important findings however subtle they might be) and make the right calls. This is difficult to do even with the training we have had. Part of it is just dealing with uncertainties. Did I make the right calls? Did I miss something subtle but important that might harm the patient - such as a subtle small nodule that 2 years later can become metastatic cancer? If so, am I going to get sued? You do that with every case, none which pay well at all. Medicare is the largest insurer in America and they pay around 4-5$ for a chest x ray or a wrist x ray or whatever joint x ray. A CT be it a cancer staging ct or trauma ct is valued at 40$. It can take a while to read if you really do your due diligence…meaning you compare to the past CTs to see how things have progressed, read history, take your time looking at the images. So it should take half an hour to read. Often times the prior imaging and clinical history isn’t even available. And if you work at big academic centers you are forced to read quickly.

No physicians want to do a bad job but we are just cogs in wheels in the medical industry complex.

I'm a physician as well (radiologist). I started practicing a few years ago, and I'm currently working part time and doing my masters in AI/data science. After a few years I hope to leave the field as well. It isn't because of lack of jobs (in fact, radiologist shortage is dire). It is because it is very stressful and demoralizing to be a physician in america, and the seemingly "high" pay does not make up for the downsides.

Sure, but in the case that the "simple trick" didn't work and someone end up with something catastrophic (e.g. missed fracture that resulted in chronic disability), who do you think they sue? Yes, the guy who tried to do right by you by saving you money. In medicine, no good deed goes unpunished.

Most of you who attack doctors have no idea how this complex health care system works. Doctors are UNDERpaid. A majority of the billing goes to overhead for the hospital facilities, nurses, labs, meds, administrators, etc, with doctors getting much less than 10% of the revenue even though they are responsible for generating most of it. Your resident doctor friend (who has way more qualifications than your software engineer friend - including top tier college, and medical school) gets paid about 60-70k a year for working at least 80 hours a week. Yes, the man or woman who assists in your brain surgery after your aneurysm popped gets paid less than your uber driver for 7 years time, and he sacrificed his/her best years to be a sleep deprived medical student and then brain surgeon working under constant rush and stress, as their 300k med school debt accumulated under high compound interest. Meanwhile, your mediocre software engineer friend graduates debt free, gets paid 160k out of college to build the next best sexting app, at a company with free lunch and gym.

Also, don't forget about the malpractices. 10 years down the line, your radiologist friend gets successfully sued for 11 million dollars bc the parents of a child for whom they read a chest radiograph decided to sue because lawyer convinced the parent and jury that radiologist was at fault for not saying the heart is enlarged and somehow that is responsible for all the kids ailments later on in life (the truth is much more complex than that). The radiologist probably got paid 7.50$ for that read, btw. This is actually a true story, look it up in the Boston Globe. Now all providers are on edge and overdiagnosing and overordering everything - who would want to miss a diagnosis.