Doctors Are Government Employees

But there’s one thing doctors never talk about, even though it easily explains the problems patients have in getting good treatment and doctors have in providing it: Doctors are government employees. I’m not talking about only the doctors that work in the Veterans’ Administration or the hospitals run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I’m not talking about the training centers known as county hospitals, where students learning the practice get to make mistakes on poor people prior to actually going out in the real world. I’m talking about all doctors — because the government contributes about 50 percent of all health care dollars to physician pay. And another 40 percent is contributed by third-party payers that are themselves highly regulated by government and routinely follow the government’s lead in pricing...more