BY KIM BELLARD

I read the Stat News investigative piece “Health care’s high rollers,” by Bob Herman and colleagues, with interest but not much surprise.  I mean, is anyone surprised anymore that healthcare CEOs often make a lot of money, and didn’t let a crisis like the pandemic dampen that?  As Kaiser Family Foundation’s CEO Drew Altman told them, “Health care has become big business. We have a lot of people making a lot of money in health care, and we still have an affordability crisis in health care.”

I periodically see Twitter threads lamenting how little of that healthcare spending actually goes to physicians, yet people often still blame them for that spending.  Physicians make a pretty decent living (an average of $322,000, according to the 2022 Medscape Physician Compensation report), although that compensation depends on specialty, gender, race/ethnicity, and location.  But maybe, just maybe, the problem in healthcare is that we’re not paying physicians enough – not nearly enough.  

I think I know how to fix healthcare.