Doctors, Like Everyone, Face
Increasing Costs
President Carter’s Council
on Wage and Price Stability reported that, in 1976, the median income of
doctors rose to $63,000. Median means
that as many doctors earned over $63,000 as beneath that figure. That means earnings could be $40,000 or
$80,000. The figure sadly is
lacking. But let’s take $63,000 for
starters.
The agreed workweek for the
average physician is 60 hours, again with some working longer and some shorter
hours. Thus, for a 60-hour week, a
$63,000 annual take home pay represents about $20 an hour. If the doctor worked 40 hours, his take home
pay would be $40,000 a year. Since a
physician takes home about 50 percent of total earnings, he must generate about
twice as much, or $120,000 yearly to pay for his office and assistants. He needs a receptionist and someone to do the
insurance forms at a very minimum.
In the same report
complaining about the median income of doctors, the Council claimed that, in
1976, doctors’ fees rose nine percent.
By the same token, his
office energy bill has gone up, as has the cost of residential energy, by more
than 10 percent. Automobile gasoline is
certainly 10 percent higher. Wages are
up. On his business telephone, local
calls, which heretofore were on a no-charge basis, have become toll calls. That is an infinite increase in costs. Ma Bell didn’t even say please. Postage stamps are supposed to go to 16
cents, a 20 percent increase. Hospital
per diem costs, and consequently rates, have climbed steeply. Everybody is trying to catch up and make ends
meet. Doctors face the same external
forces that the rest of the people face.
But why pick on the doctors?
For example, in real
estate, the standard commission of selling a residential home is seven percent
and a commercial property is 10 percent (no competition here among the
realtors). But the real income has
increased as the price of real estate has escalated about 10 percent per year.
How about athletes basking
in multi-year million dollar contracts?
How about entertainers, with $10,000 per stint? After all, that money, earned from TV
commercials, raises the price of the food you eat and the cars you buy.
Then there are the enormous
salaries of the corporate crowd, pair for by the price of the product. I mean, who complains about them? What about the six-figure salaried paid to
the heads of those same utility companies who openly pass along to you and me
THEIR increased fuel costs, taking us into their confidence by showing it as a
separate item on our bills? President
Carter ought to appoint a special agency to complain about people who haven’t
been complained about recently.
The problem is that doctors
are being featured as some extraordinary phenomenon by the economy, the cause
of runaway inflation, perhaps.
But here are other factors
to be taken into account before the public puts the doctor to the rack. First, he is a taxpayer, and an employer of
people who pay taxes. He works as an
engine, to support that part of the economy that furnishes his supplies.
Additionally, because of
the tax bracket he falls in, he gets half pay for overtime, instead of time and
a half. Furthermore, the doctor is
obligated to 24-hour service, so that even though his work is merely 60 hours,
his responsibility extends for 168 hours weekly. And he can’t choose his working hours.
Malpractice insurance has
jumped 500 percent and threatens to go up another 40 percent this year. A doctor starting in practice faces
tremendous debt burdens.
When the doctor is sick
there is no one to mind the store; when the sickness is prolonged, the store
closes.
Now the government agency
complains that the doctors earn five times as much as the average working
American. The comparison is not
valid. Doctors’ earnings should be
compared with those in comparable professions.
Now I don’t want to leave
the impression that doctors are underprivileged. They are working professionals with a good
rate of return. They are fortunate to be
able to serve as physicians. Neither are
they denizens of the financial deep. Yet
they are being singled out inordinately by the media as a sort of robber baron
class responsible all by themselves for the inflation, the stagnation, the
depression, and the oil and energy problems.
It is really not so. The only thing doctors do well is to take
care of the sick. We steadfastly refuse
credit for anything else.