Interesting healthcare alternative

[mu03eng]

Anyone believe physician compensation is messed up?

Yes, hospitals predominately don't make money off of the procedures themselves, where they make the money is off the after care services where there are considerably lower labor costs.

Part of the compensation issue is certification/degree creep going on in the industry. A lot of would be doctors are choosing to go to PA school instead because it's only 6 years of school instead of at least 8 to be a full fledged doctor and in most cases the PA's are seeing the majority of the non-surgical patients.

As another example the APTA is currently advocating that all future PT degrees be doctorial degrees with at least a year of internship meaning physical therapists of the future would all have to go to school/intern for 7-8 years and incur lots of additional debt without any appreciable difference in capability.

Much like the tax system in this country, the medical system is outdated and in bad need of an overall and it's not just the insurance industry.

[forgetful]

A lot of would be doctors are choosing to go to PA school instead because it's only 6 years of school instead of at least 8 to be a full fledged doctor and in most cases the PA's are seeing the majority of the non-surgical patients.

This is very misleading.  Although a lot of people are going the PA school route instead of medical school for the reasons you are saying, it has no impact on the number of doctors. 

The number of seats in medical school and residency positions are fixed.  There are around 500 students applying for each available seat in medical school.

Non-surgical doctors are often greatly overpaid, because they can easily be replaced by a nurse practitioner or PA, with actually better care.   

[brewcity77]

NPs and PAs are also coming from individuals that never planned to go the doctor route. My wife looked into a PA program and she's a medical lab tech who never considered becoming a doctor. A friend at work recently got his NP license with his primary medical background being a paramedic. Another buddy at an old job had NP as his main goal from the start because he could practice sooner with a better bang for his buck in terms of salary to education ratio.

There may be more NPs and PAs now than there were, but many of them never considered going the MD route.