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by sanderjd
3133 days ago
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The way to make it clearer would be to discuss specifically why the services rendered by residents are not valuable enough to cover their costs. A concrete example: I've had a resident do a checkup while I was in the hospital. If they hadn't done it, a fully trained doctor making a lot more per hour would have needed to. Did the hospital lose money on that checkup? If so, wouldn't they have lost more money if the fully trained doctor would have done it? If they make money on that sort of thing, what kinds of things are the opposite? I don't know how it works, I've only ever been a patient. It seems like you might know, so I'm asking you how it works. Do you see how "they don't make money" is really not an answer? |
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You're assuming that, in the absence of the resident, they'd be hiring an additional attending physician. In reality, they'd just have a smaller staff, and you'd have to wait longer, the doctor would have to work longer/harder/faster, etc to cover the same patient load.
Hiring a resident doesn't bring in additional revenue. Insurers don't reimburse more per patient just because an additional physician was involved. Hiring a resident doesn't bring more patients in the door, because that's not the bottleneck for hospitals anyway. It does increase costs, because it's an additional person on staff - they have to pay them an extra $51,000/year, plus 25% of the cost of an additional attending physician to supervise them (and three other residents), plus taxes, plus health insurance, plus insurance to practice medicine, plus licensing fees, and so on.
> Did the hospital lose money on that checkup?
Probably not, unless you're on Medicare or Medicaid - in which case, yes, they do lose money on you on a per-patient, per-service basis.