
Piecework: Medicine’s money problem - jimsojim
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/04/piecework
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JimboOmega
This could use a 2005 flag on it.

Not that much has changed - I got rather far before the size of the premium
increases raised a red flag to me.

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blisterpeanuts
Thanks for the heads up; I totally missed the date. Geeze.

He also didn't mention the ACA, which should have been a yellow flag.

I have a relative in the pain management business -- and I do mean business.
He's an internal medicine doc, making over a million a year, probably
substantially more in fact, by focusing on a lucrative niche of people with
whiplash, back aches, etc. The trick is to process them through as quickly as
possible. He gets 40-60 patients a day, and each billing between $60 and $800
depending on the condition. If you puncture someone, e.g. shot for sciatic
pain, the billable is $800 to $1200. Pain pills might be worth $100. With
enough numbers, and keep the personnel costs down by using medical assistants,
and you've got a really lucrative practice.

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forinti
Paying doctors by procedure is like paying programers by line of code.

If this were the case, there'd be tons of Java programers and few enlightened
souls would bother with Perl.

~~~
KingMob
Heh. If that were the case, we'd still program in assembly, and RISC
architectures would have taken over CPUs.

~~~
zepto
RISC architectures have taken over CPUs

~~~
KingMob
Only internally. The public ISA is usually CISC. But the internal RISC-ness is
_why_ most RISC architectures died out. Once it happened, you got many of the
benefits of both RISC and CISC.

