Most practicing physicians are underpaid for their efforts, sacrifices,and the conditions they must endure. My physician works more than 60 hours per week. I worry about his health! Most of these types of articles are written and published by jealous, power hungry academics who were unable to become a practicing physician due to lack of ability, dedication, or "guts." They are so transparent and pathetic. Unfortunately, I know too many of them.

"The study did not look into whether the higher salaries were warranted."

And this is why you really cannot read much into the study. Doctors fees are directly attributable to three things: 1) cost of education, 2) cost of malpractice insurance, and 3) what health insurance is willing to pay for services.

There is a reason why the U.S. is preparing to face a major shortage in general practitioners in the very near future: because it's unprofitable to be one. There's a reason why your doctor can only see you for five minutes before rushing off to their next patient; because medicine has become a volume business now, with razor thin margins.

Granted, doctors who specialize are still keeping their heads above water, but your basic family doctor is getting slammed by dwindling payments from Medicare and private insurance, not to mention the arcane maze of rules the insurance companies have created to make it harder to bills. They are getting slammed by the increasing willingness of patients to go to litigation, not because of real negligence or malpractice, but because the patient or its family expected a miracle when there was none to be had.

So really, this all boils down to our country becoming litigation-happy. The insurance companies have to charge more and pay out less, the doctors have to take out larger malpractice policies, and the only people who win out are the lawyers.

You may look at the premium amount and think that there is no way that you can afford it. You cannot afford to be without health insurance! shop around you may find it easy to find an affordable premium, I always find health insurance through "Penny Health" network.

When lawyers average three times the hourly wage that physicians receive, I question the motivations for the question here. Physicians spend an average of five more years in training than lawyers but earn less. Go after the 1.1 million attorneys.

Doctors take all the financial risk: hundreds of thousands of dollars in education cost, tremendous overhead for office practice, overinflated malpractice costs, etc. Let's talk about how the insurance industry pays CEO's millions per year with ridiculous bonus packages while cutting reimbursements to docs and raising premiums while providing less coverage to the insured. Ridiculous situation, ridiculous study.

As a medical student working 80+ hours a week, and currently spending $80,000 a year to do so, I have to disagree. Going to medical schools in other countries is largely subsidized by the state. Certainly nowhere else requires students to pay as much as we do. The salaries cited above are not the figures doctors make coming out of medical school, either. To become an orthopedic surgeon, one must spend an additional 5 years after 4 years of medical school while making ~$50K/year to work 80-100 hours per week. Don't think that covers your medical school debt. Yeah, I think those salaries are appropriate. With all of this sort of talk, people of equal intelligence and ability as those of us in medical school are more and more going for the jobs out of college that start at 80K/yr. If we want competent doctors I recommend not curbing healthcare costs by reigning in doctors salaries.

Until very recently, despite being a trained specialist physician who also holds a Ph.D., my wife earned more than I did. She must be overpaid, too. She has a master's degree and is a public school teacher.

The thesis of this article has so many flaws it does not merit much rebuttal except to remind everyone that physicians bill insurance carriers but the compensation they receive for services is set by the insurance company based on factors well outside the physician's control. So arguing that physicians are overpaid based on insurance reimbursement rates makes as much sense as arguing about the price of a Big Mac with the McDonald's cashier. We ceded reimbursement to the insurance companies which was a fatal tactic and a subject worthy of debate.

I would also point out that if you reduce physician compensation without also reducing physician educational debt burden, minimizing time spent in training, restructuring insurance reimbursement, producing meaningful malpractice reform, and seriously re-evaluating how many and what kind of physicians we produce to meet the demands of the market, you are not going to find a large and eager pool of individuals who will sacrifice decades of their lives to training for an 80+ hour per week job with lower pay than that of a public school teacher, a high stress load, and that demands perfection such that one is a potential mistake away from a bankruptcy-inducing lawsuit.

It takes 12-15 years of post high school education and training, up to a half million dollars of tuition and student loan debt and years or relentless work and personal sacrifice to become a doctor. Despite the high salaries, we still have a doctor shortage. We need to rethink how people are trained and how the cost of becoming a doctor can be reduced. That will lead to more practitioneers and a reduction of wages. It's simply supply and demand.

Average salaries of NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL are $2-5 million a year. Many singers, actors, models, and other celebrities earn similar figures or more. Many doctors spend 60+ hours a week saving dozens, if not hundreds, of lives a year, for which they make on average about $200,000 to $400,000. People often underestimate the enormous responsibility and stress doctors bear every time they lift up a scalpel, write a prescription, read an x-ray, interpret a tissue specimen, etc. A tiny mistake could mean a life or death for a patient. Is Lady Gaga's 5 minute performance really worth 10 times more than an 8 hour surgery to remove a tumor from a brain? Is a missed field goal more catastrophic than missing the cancer by 1 mm with a radiation beam?

How much do you think a cardiologist puting a stent at 2 or 3:00 AM when a patient is having a heart attack should be paid? How much do you think the surgeon that implanted an LVAD to keep Mr D. Cheney going should be paid? or an an orthopedic surgeon replacing a hip or a knee making an invalide patient fully functional. Some things are really priceless.
If you divide the yearly income by the number of hours spent at work, a physician is probably not any better than a repairman coming to your house charging an hourly fee for labor.
If physician's income is the problem, it is simple to solve it. Let's send all patients to Europe, Canada, Australia or better to Thailand or India since we have no problem outsoursing anything else!

No, doctors' salaries are linked to deliberate plans to limit the number of people who go through the IHEs specifically in order to keep salaries high. This has been reported on multiple times. Reports have also shown a willingness of people to become doctors and earn a lower salary. Likewise, research has shown that admitting more candidates to those programs, including people with lower test scores, does not negatively impact services.

Want to know who's really overpaid? Professional athletes!!!!

Most of the comments here are silly.

People are paid based on MARKET VALUE not "emotional worth, the societal value of their work, or how hard they work. This is the reason why a soldier in afghanistan will get paid ~50k to put himself in harms way daily while a high frequency trader on wall street can earn >$150k to make the market more efficient by microseconds.

That being said, to some degree physicians are overpaid due to the opaqueness of medical billing system, inefficiencies in the private/public insurance scheme, and the board that regulates the # of newly minted doctors. They keep the # of doctors a little short so that demand will always be greater than supply so that the salaries don't go down.

As for lawyers... the starting pay is bimodal. Some are trapped as public defenders earning ~$50k while others are doing corporate law earning ~$150k. Law school outside the top tier is a LARGE risk. Whereas for doctors, there is infinite job security, something that can't be found for almost all professions.

Jim,
People with limited knowledge, like you, are laying the ground work for lower standards of care. Letting more people into schools and lowering the requirements for admission makes the future doctors less qualified. I would not want one of these doctors working on me.

The people that are truly overpaid are the insurance companies--Heath and Malpractice--to name a few. It's egregious the sums of money that they can charge for their "services". Doctors pay through the nose for malpractice, and patients pay for Health insurance.

Lawyers are also making a killing off of malpractice claims--there needs to be tort reform. If a case is deemed frivolous, the patient should pay for lawyer fees. None of this "you pay nothing if we don't get you a payout". That encourages people who wouldn't sue to sue. What do they have to lose? nothing. They look at these payouts as a paycheck.

We need to stop comparing physicians compensation to that of athletes and entertainers that make up such a small percentage of the population, they are a statistical non-entity. A student studying liberal arts generally incurs the same undergraduate student loan debt as any pre-med major. And, oftentimes liberal arts graduates continue their studies. Physicians in America are clearly overpaid. That said, there are a number of scholarship opportunities for medical students to have their tuition fully subsidized, ie., military scholarship programs. Maybe medical students are beating on the recruiters doors, but I doubt it. Overall, its a cost analysis. Medical schools wouldn't be charging outrages tuition rates if the reward didnt allow their graduates to repay their debt, and live an overall good quality of life. If you have to justify your compensation by comparing it to that of Lady GaGa, you might be as overpaid as she is.

Flash, you are full of garbage. Physicians should refuse to be paid after they have rendered the service. Physicians should set their own fees like the damn lawyers. Physicians should stop listening to those who think they are over paid. Physicians should stop justifying themselves. Physicians should ask for their payments up front. Many American patients are nasty, demanding, needy, non compliant, self destructive, addicted, exaggerating, litigious, hypochondriacs. Physicians should be paid a whole lot more just for putting up with them.

Maybe when college and medical school are free (like in most other countries), then we can talk about bringing physician pay in line with what it is in other countries.

But the billing system in the United States is totally, completely screwed up. The practice of billing $2,000 and while fully expecting insurance to pay $800 needs to stop.

And who here talks about doctors' overhead in the US? No such egregious and exorbitant spending in Scandinavia or Great Britain. The secretary must be paid, so should all the ancillary workers, so should the PAs and nurse practitioners and so should all the numerous others necessary to document, get prior authorization, do data entry, billing, so on and so forth endlessly, until the crumbs thrown by the insurance companies are eaten by the bureaucrats leaving nothing for the doctor. Overhead is overwhelming for the doctors in the USA....

jim,
i am in medical school right now and i can tell you there are plenty of fellow future doctors here that i would not "send my mother to". And you would like to let less qualified students in? i am guessing you have no connection to the real process so i don't think you are in a position to make that judgment (any citations for longitudinal studies following less qualified med students along with their better qualified counterparts into medical practice objectively analyzing their "quality of services"?)

flash,
i almost shouldn't justify your comment with a response but i could not resist. jumping from a discussion on undergraduate debt to claiming physicians are overpaid doesn't make much sense...average med school debt is now north of $120,000 and then you can factor in the opportunity cost of not paying off undergraduate debt by spending another 4 years in school. opportunities for fully subsidized tuition? first of all, congress just eliminated what little amount of subsidized graduate loans were available. second of all, getting into the HPSP programs (military scholarships) is not as simple as just signing up. the scholarships are limited, the screening process is frustrating, and even then you do have to pay on the other end. in many cases, you end up repaying the years spent in an armed forces residency on top of those four years of medical school. med students are in med school because they are (at least somewhat) smart. if the scholarship programs were more accessible and wholly worth it, i am sure they would be more attractive.

the three main problems that i see with our healthcare system:
1) the US is a litigious society. as a people, we are greedy, impatient, and expect things to be perfect. malpractice insurance premiums are extremely high and tort reform is an absolute must. doctors should not be expected to pay court fees because of the recklessness of one of their patients.

2) chronic lifestyle choices that lead to acute and costly medical conditions. obesity is a huge drain on the healthcare system. primary care and preventive medicine are really important for this reason and cutting physicians pay will force an even greater shortage of these types of services.

3) our healthcare system: health insurance, medicare, etc. it's all a mess and i really don't have a good solution for it. we don't get good value for our dollar. i think this is probably greatly impacted by point number 2 but also i think better research on improving diagnostic techniques and reducing their costs will make a significant difference.

We really need to look at the hourly rate for comparison. Overseas, docs tend to work a regular week and are under salary. Here pay is production dependent. The secret of health reform is not how much docs make but adding a value measure like price into the purchase decision. ES4P.com is a site trying to educate physicians to principles like this