Elections ***Third Democratic Primary Debate play-by-play thread***

[Lubaolong]

A ton of business/ industries have payroll north of 50% of budget. Pretty surprising that’s only 10%. What is it with the other staff?

If you look up a breakdown of healthcare expenditure, it will say 20% goes to "physician services."

Many doctors get their salary from an entity that employs them. Payment to these entities may fall under "physician services," but not all the money goes directly to physician salaries but also maybe stuff like administrative salaries.

Likewise, if you're in the 30 or 40% of physicians in private practice, you may collect X dollars from medicare/medicaid for "physician services," but your salary isn't X. It's X minus the overhead of the clinic, including huge salaries of nurses, malpractice, equipment, and other stuff.

Quickly and easy calculation is to take the average physician salary $299k x 1.1 million physicians in the US divided by $3.65 trillion US healthcare expenditure = 9%. You could probably do similar type calculations with nurses (seems to be around 6%) and other staff as well.

 

[Lead]

If you look up a breakdown of healthcare expenditure, it will say 20% goes to "physician services."

Many doctors get their salary from an entity that employs them. Payment to these entities may fall under "physician services," but not all the money goes directly to physician salaries but also maybe stuff like administrative salaries.

Likewise, if you're in the 30 or 40% of physicians in private practice, you may collect X dollars from medicare/medicaid for "physician services," but your salary isn't X. It's X minus the overhead of the clinic, including huge salaries of nurses, malpractice, equipment, and other stuff.

Quickly and easy calculation is to take the average physician salary $299k x 1.1 million physicians in the US divided by $3.65 trillion US healthcare expenditure = 9%. You could probably do similar type calculations with nurses (seems to be around 6%) and other staff as well.

I see