Publishing Physician Salaries Draws Reader Response

Salary Statistics Shed Light on Primary Care

Thank you for publishing "Disparate Dollars" in your April issue. Speaking as a general pediatrician, I thought the article was right on point, especially regarding the future of medicine for primary care practitioners.

I'm a pediatrician in private practice with five other pediatricians. We're curious. Are you getting inundated with responses about physician incomes? We're wondering where pediatricians are getting a starting salary of $160,000.

We are currently looking to replace one of the pediatricians in our group who is leaving the practice of medicine. (She is marrying and relocating to Argentina.) Your article has given us a few more reasons to explain the difficulty we are having in finding a young physician to join our group practice.

Dawn L. Bruner, MD
Pediatrics
Tustin


Residency Match Statistics Corroborate April Cover Story Theme

The April cover story, "Disparate Dollars," discussed how the gap between primary care and specialist salaries is leading to a decrease in primary care doctors. The statistics from the annual National Resident Matching Program seem to confirm the trend.

* In 2006, 85 percent of the family medicine residency positions offered have been filled. By comparison, 82.4 percent of the family medicine residency positions filled in the 2005 match.

* Even though 26 more medical students matched into family medicine this year, there were 55 fewer positions offered than in 2005. The same number of students chose family medicine in 2006 compared with 2005.

* The total proportion of students matching into primary care specialties remains low. Of the 20,072 applicants who selected residencies through the match this year, only 3,032 matched into clearly identified primary care programs.

Family medicine is an integral part of the solution to providing high-quality, affordable and accessible healthcare to everyone. Studies clearly demonstrate that a higher ratio of primary care physicians to population leads to better health outcomes and lower costs.

Family physicians are the nexus of the U.S. healthcare safety net. Unless purposeful steps are taken now, the continuing low proportion of physicians choosing primary care will mean an increasingly fragmented, overspecialized and inefficient system.

Family physicians provide most of the care offered by Community Health Centers, many of which are located in the nearly 25 percent of U.S. counties with less than one primary care doctor for every 3,500 patients. While the Bush administration plans to increase the number of CHCs, the president's proposed budget for 2007 zeros out funding vital to family medicine training programs.

Congress can correct that imbalance by amending the budget to increase funding for family medicine training programs. Increased funding would lead to a greater number of family physicians who could help deliver high-quality care to all Americans in a cost-effective way.

Larry S. Fields, MD
President
American Academy of Family Physicians
Leawood, Kan.


Editor's Note:

In addition to physicians sending the letters at left, a few physicians called to get more details about the salary figures Southern California Physician ran in April. So here is a bit of background about the data and the firms that generated it.

Dallas-based Delta Physician Placement (www.deltamedcon.com) provided three of the four charts in the article, on Pages 15, 19 and 20. Delta is a national search and consulting firm with assignments nationwide across all specialties. Using actual data from searches performed, Delta compiles and publishes the "Physician Recruiting Standard," a quarterly newsletter about compensation trends.

The charts in Southern California Physician included data for the year Jan. 1, 2005, to Dec. 31, 2005. Delta released the report in February 2006. The "starting compensation" figures are for physicians starting at a new position, not starting out in medicine. Delta does not presently collect data on the average number of years of experience.

About 15 percent of the data is from California searches, the rest is from searches across the country. "The data is still extremely relevant to California practices," say Marc Bowles, executive vice president. "Physicians should still take into consideration national compensation data, because this is how the candidate pool is looking at jobs on a national level."

A leading healthcare magazine, Medical Economics (www.memag.com) is the source for the chart on Page 16. The data is from the magazine's annual national physician compensation survey. Seeking data about 2004 salaries, the magazine conducted its survey via mail over several months in mid-2005 and received 5,563 usable responses. The survey sample was selected to represent each specialty as to type of practice, age, geographical region and gender. The results were weighted to reflect these criteria.

Southern California Physician would have preferred to run local data, but found no source for California physician compensation figures.

If you have further questions about the article or the data, please contact Janis Rizzuto, publisher/editor, at 714/978-1100 or janisr@socalphys.com.