Primary care physicians receive the lowest reimbursement of all physician specialties, indicating a need for reforms that would increase incomes or reduce work hours for primary care physicians.
J. Paul Leigh, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of California, Davis, used data from 6,381 physicians providing patient care in the 2004-2005 Community Tracking Study.
Medical specialties were divided into four categories: primary care; surgery; internal medicine/pediatric subspecialists; and an “other” category with physicians practicing in areas such as radiation oncology, emergency medicine, ophthalmology, and dermatology.
Wages of procedure-oriented specialists were approximately 36%-48% higher than those of primary care physicians, the investigators found.
Specifically, specialties with statistically higher-than-average wages perform neurologic, orthopedic, or ophthalmologic surgery, and use sophisticated technologies or administer expensive drugs in office settings, they found. Lower-paid specialties, meanwhile, were largely nonprocedural and relied instead on talking to and examining patients, they noted, adding that “the major exception is critical-care internal medicine.”
Wages per hour for primary care physicians were about $61, whereas surgeons earned about $90 per hour and other procedure-oriented specialties earned close to $88 per hour, the study said. Internal medicine subspecialists and pediatric subspecialists, meanwhile, earned slightly more than $82 per hour (Arch. Intern. Med. 2010;170:1728-34).