From a piece at Junk Science, The Vision of our Healthcare. These are the correct rates for docs as determined by the geniuses at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid:
Emergency medicine is valued at $38.36/hour, while chiropractors are at $65.33/hour (even 31% higher than previously) and osteopathic manipulative therapy is valued at $53.93/hour. Endocrinology (think especially diabetes and obesity) was valued by the PPIS at nearly twice what the CMS had been using to determine physician payments, and is now at $84.39/hour. Family medicine saw a similar increase and is now valued at $90.15/hour. In contrast, for example, Cardiologists’ value was cut nearly in half to $88.04/hour. Allergy and Immunology care was increased to $162.68/hour and Dermatology was increased to $184.62/hour.
When you’re injured or have a real medical emergency, or actually develop a disease, which of the best doctors will you hope are available to care for you: emergency medical physician, cardiologist, family medicine doctor, chiropractor or dermatologist?
News to me that chiropractors are covered by government insurance but, for all I know, they may cover massage too. Anyway, are these numbers insane? No doc could pay his school debt and his malpractice insurance on those fees, plus office and staff overhead.
This is valuing ER docs lower than what I pay my part-time secretary. But my real comparisons are my excellent plumber ($125/hr) and the local electronics repairman ($175/hr).
Read the whole piece. Another interesting bit he has in there is about the quackery of "Lifestyle Medicine." He has it right:
The popular belief, rigorously spread by the growing lifestyle medicine movement, is that chronic diseases of aging; such as cancers, heart disease and diabetes; can be prevented and are to blame on unhealthy diets and lifestyles and failing to control health risk factors. The actual fact is that the best randomized controlled trials (the gold standards of medical evidence) continue to fail to support such premises behind lifestyle medicine, as we’ve seen time and again. The 64 percent drop in age-related deaths from heart disease over the past 50 years, for example, is largely attributed to our modern, advanced medical care and coupled with the survival advantage of a better fed, immunized and overall healthier population. Even mainstream medicine is finally realizing lifestyle medicine is more pseudoscience and ideology than sound, evidence-based science.
Fads and quackery have always abounded in Medicine. Who would expect government to be able to tell the difference?
Related, how they keep medical costs down in England
