Doctor Car Disparity

My doctor friend recently sent me this great picture which highlighted the disparity in physician compensation as illustrated by the cars they drive:
doctor-perception-issues-and-car-disparity

Just to be clear, my friend is the one driving the Honda and not the BMW or Audi. I bet you could do a pretty great post comparing various physicians to various types of cars, but I digress. No doubt there’s a disparity in the cars doctors drive, but also between physician specialties as well.

The reason this picture really resonated with me is that I’ve regularly commented that doctors don’t do themselves any favors by driving super expensive, luxury cars. For the record, anyone is welcome to drive whatever car they want, but you can’t later be upset when people don’t believe you when you say that physicians don’t get paid well enough. There’s a massive disconnect when you’re able to drive such an expensive car and then claim you don’t get paid enough.

Take a look at the physician parking at your local hospital. After looking at it, it’s hard to argue that physicians aren’t getting paid enough even if it’s likely true for many specialties (starting with primary care). This picture seemed to illustrate that principle really well.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Lets be perfectly clear here. I get paid less than $1000 for fixing a fractured hip with surgery AND for the 90 days after by Medicare and do it perfectly so you can walk again. Tell me how much it costs if you want a plumber to come to your home and fix something and whatever happens for 90 days after? Or how much does it cost to change the oil in your car? About what we get for an office visit? So don’t start looking at a $70K car or even a $100K car and say we get paid too much. Thats crap. Should we be paying Wall Street folks and bankers millions in bonuses for their contribution to society? We literally save limbs and lives, we should be paid for that, its stressful, difficult, takes more than a decade of training, and believe it or not we put YOUR lives ahead of ours when it comes to driving in at 4am to help you after you fracture you leg and the tibia is poking out in the breeze. We do that. And guess what, the toughest most harrowing difficult operation is a heart transplant, and guess what Medicare pays the surgeon for that (plus 90 days), about $4000. That is the highest they pay for a procedure and the rest are markedly less than that. So do me a favor, take the deal you are getting for us taking care of you. We could stop accepting medicare and insurance and medicaid and we could charge whatever we want, as you lie there in the gurney. But most of us, do our job as part of our duty to society to our patients to be paid somewhat fairly for what we do for you.

  • meltoots,
    I’m not arguing that doctors get paid too much. My personal opinion is that we pay some specialties too much and some too little. Plus, we pay too little for certain procedures and not enough for other procedures. Those are problems that should be fixed. What I am saying is that these things won’t get fixed as long as doctors drive these great cars (and that’s just one example) that give most people the impression that doctors are getting paid more than enough. That’s just a battle of public perception that doctors have to overcome or things won’t change.

    As far as the Wall Street Folks and bankers, that’s an awful argument since everyone that thinks that doctors are overpaid thinks that those groups are overpaid as well. You can’t use one group being overpaid as a justification to be overpaid as well. In fact, it just reinforces in people’s mind that you’re overpaid if you compare yourselves.

    Back to where we started, I agree there are issues with the reimbursement many doctors receive. However, that won’t change if perception about doctors pay doesn’t change.

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