I wish somebody could tell me how it is that group doctors make so much more money than I can make in solo practice.
My only experience with groups (outside the government)was many years ago when I sold my practice to a large private group which then sold itself to a hospital. After interminable "staff" meetings at which nothing was ever accomplished, and in which nobody ever did anything but whine, I would go to the clinic to try to see patients that had been scheduled by a scheduling clerk who knew nothing about medicine, nothing about the patients --and certainly didn't try to let me see my "own" patients. In fact, the whole point was to commodify patients and doctors, and make them interchangeable parts in an industrial enterprise -- allegedly to make "healthcare" more "efficient". The result was predictable.
I put my tail between my legs and left, and thankfully had not signed a exclusionary agreement, and opened my own practice again in the same town -- although the hospital tried to enforce a nonexistent geographic exclusion clause, and that caused more heart ache, but finally went away. That all turned out to be a bid by a regional hospital to take over the local hospital, and it failed. Ultimately, though, the local hospital has bought up or otherwise employed most of the doctors in town and is running a sort of half-assed "group."
The point of all this is that there was nothing very efficient about the way I was practicing in that group, and there's nothing very efficient about the way I see the local hospital group is practicing, and yet they make twice or 3x as much money.
That can only be possible if they are seriously "overcoding", or I am seriously "undercoding" or they have a source of revenue I can't tap into.
Bottom line for me, though -- solo practice is the only possible way for physicians who value their relationship to their patients above their loyalty and relationship to their employer. Independence has a price -- or as the Tea Party says, "freedom isn't free" (thought I doubt their understanding of that slogan is the same as mine.)
