How Can Health Care Cost So Much?

There is a great article in today's New York Times about physicians earnings when compared with the earnings of the administrative side of health care and this is what it shows:

"The base pay of insurance executives, hospital executives and even hospital administrators often far outstrips doctors’ salaries, according to an analysis performed for The New York Times by Compdata Surveys: $584,000 on average for an insurance chief executive officer, $386,000 for a hospital C.E.O. and $237,000 for a hospital administrator, compared with $306,000 for a surgeon and $185,000 for a general doctor."

So if we want to be angry at the high cost of medicine now you know who to blame. For all the Aetna policy holders, the top person at Aetna earned $36,000,000 last year in compensation while the average FAMILY physician earned $165,000 which means that he earned 218 TIMES what the average doc earned. Put another way...you could hire 219 physicians to help treat patients (and eliminate waiting times) or you could pay ONE CEO who sits in a nice office and cures no one.

How is this working for us?

If you would like to read the full article please go to:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/sunday-review/doctors-salaries-are-not-the-big-cost.html?hp&rref=opinion