Some Nurses Paid More Than Family Doctors
10:04 PM Posted by exclusiveMD
Despite the growing shortage of family doctors in the United States, medical centers last year offered higher salaries and incentives to specialist nurses than to primary care doctors, according to an annual survey of physicians' salaries.Maybe not all physicians are beginning to feel like "second class citizens" as you will read in this article, but there is definitely quite a bit of commotion going on in the medical community when startling facts such as these arise. It is particularly disturbing when it is noted that right now the nation is facing a deficit of 60,000 family practitioners, with more dropping their practices every year to go into other areas of medicine or no medicine at all. Not only are established family doctors dropping their practices all together, but new medical students (who usually graduate medical school in their late 20s) are choosing higher paying medical professions. With the deficit and the large number of medical students choosing other paths, what will happen when/if the nation decides on a universal healthcare option? There just aren’t enough primary care physicians out there to supply the need.
"The demand for primary care doctors will increase twofold when health reform happens and millions of more Americans have access to health care," said Mosley. "Who is going to triage these patients? It's not the neurologist or pulmonologist. It has to be the primary care doctor."
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