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Are physician salaries too high?

March 20th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in Medblogger Shout Outs
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I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

–Mark Twain

As we consider the wastefulness of the healthcare system, I have heard many people complain that physician salaries are one of the main culprits in escalating costs.

Dr. Reece compares the average income of some of the highest paid physician specialists, with that of hospital executives, medical insurance executives, and fortune 500 CEOs. Check this out:

Highest Paid Physicians

1. Orthopedic, spinal surgery, $554,000
2. Neurosurgery, $476,000
3. Heart surgeons, $470,000
4. Diagnostic radiology, Interventional, $424,000
5. Sports Medicine, surgery, $417,000
6. Orthopedic Surgery, $400,000
7. Radiology, non-interventional, $400,000
8. Cardiology, $363,000
9. Vascular surgery, $354,000
10. Urology, $349,000

Executive Pay for Massachusetts Hospital CEOs

1. James Mongan, MD, Partners Healthcare, $2.1 million
2. Elaine Ullian, Boston Medical Center, $1.4 million
3. John O’Brien, UMass Memorial Medical Center, $1.3 million
4. David Barrett, MD, Lahey Clinic, $1.3 million
5. Mark Tolosky, Baystate Health, $1.2 million
6. James Mandell, MD, Children’s Hospital, Boston, $1.1 million
7. Gary Gottlieb, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, $1 million
8. Peter Slavind, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital, $1 million

2005 Total Annual Compensation for Publicly Traded Managed Care CEOs

1. United Health Care $8.3 million
2. Wellpoint, Inc, $5.2 million
3. CIGNA, $4.7 million
4. Sierra Health, $3.4 million
5. Aetna, Inc, $3.3 million
6. Assurant, Inc, $2.3 million
7. Humana, $1.9 million
8. Health Net, $1.7 million

Top Corporate CEO Compensation

1. Capital One Financial, $249 million
2. Yahoo, $231 million
3. Cedant, $140 million
4. KB Home, $135 million
5. Lehman Brothers Holdings, $123 million
6. Occidental Petroleum,, $81 million
7. Oracle, $75 million
8. Symantec, $72 million
9. Caremark Rx, $70 million
10. Countrywide Financial, $69 million

But the real story here is the salary of our primary care physicians – those unsung heroes of the front lines. KevinMD pointed out a recent news article citing $75,000.00/year as the average salary of the family physician in the state of Connecticut, and that their malpractice insurance consumed $15,000.00 of that. Although this is certainly below the national average for pediatricians (they start at about 110,000 to 120,000), I’ve seen many academic positions in the $90,000 to 100,000 range.

Now I ask you, does it seem fair that the vast majority of physicians (the primary care physicians) are making one tenth of the average hospital executive salary? Should doctors really be in the cross hairs of cost containment?

This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.

Can we cure malaria with blood pressure medicine?

February 21st, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in News
1 Comment »

Malaria is caused by a crafty little parasite that has become resistant to many medicines. But now researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a chink in its armor – a blood pressure medicine called propranolol. Who knew that a common beta-blocker used to treat hypertension might provide the death blow to such a scourge?

Usually, malarial parasites infect their host’s blood stream through a mosquito bite, and then congregate in the liver and pounce on red blood cells as they pass by. They have a way of adhering to the red blood cells via certain surface receptors (beta 2 adrenergic receptors linked to Gs proteins). They latch on to the red cells and then burrow into the cell and hijack it in order to reproduce inside it. Then, like the horror movie Alien, once they’re fully grown (into “schizonts”) they burst out of the cells and roam free to repeat the process all over again.

Now propranolol happens to block the Gs proteins, which effectively makes it impossible for the parasites to attach themselves to the red blood cells (which they need to use to reproduce themselves).

So what’s the caveat to of all this? Well, folks don’t know they have been infected with malaria until they have symptoms, and the symptoms include high fevers and low blood pressure… so giving someone a medicine that lowers their blood pressure even further might not be a good idea.

The other caveat is that propranolol works like a charm in the test tube, and in mice, but we haven’t yet tried it out in humans who have malaria.

Still, it seems to me that a little bit of propranolol might go a long way to preventing malarial infections in at risk populations. I’ll be interested to see what further studies show!

And if you’re interested, I’ll create a few more blog posts about parasites and other creepy crawly human invaders… Just let me know if you can handle more of this!

This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.