How do residents get paid

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Toggle menubar Invested MD. Open search box. Search sitewide Close search box. Current Locale: English Canada. And as we know, corporations, including hospitals, like to keep expenses low. Actually, this is exactly how it used to be. So they gave them a place to sleep, food, and worked them.

In , President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law. And for one reason or another, the US government made sure that funding residency education was a part of it. It turns out they actually just wanted to make sure we had enough doctors. Specifically, they said this:. You can ignore that for now. DGME is where Medicare pays for the direct costs of residents. Teaching stipends.

Building maintenance. And yes, resident salaries. What is the base period? Most programs that were active at the time had their base period set at Costs during the base period were the DGME costs at the time. For newer programs that started after , they use either an average of DGME costs for surrounding hospitals or the average costs for the first few years the program is open, whichever is lower.

Remember, direct costs include resident salaries, but also teaching costs, building maintenance, and more. The teaching hospital itself decides how much of the pie residents get, and essentially gets to keep the rest. For example, consider the law written in In addition, during their first year in residency, doctors do not generate revenue independently because they cannot bill for services independent of the attending physician that supervises their practice.

One year of residency is required to get a license to practice medicine. Residency to specialize in a particular field of medicine can last from three to eight years. With fellowships, this can go up to 10 years. Skip to content Salarship. This is pretty misleading. Surgical sub-specialty residents and fellows make more than primary care residents on average because they spend more years in training and residents get paid more based on the year of training.

With almost no exception everyone in the same post graduate level gets paid the exact same salary within the same hospital. The other factor includes the fact that primary care physicians can be trained at rural hospitals which have a lower cost-of-living and therefore their salaries are adjusted to be slightly lower than those in bigger cities.

Metropolitan areas train all types of physicians. I suggest the author be more careful before publishing such statements. Please forgive typos from first post. Having to service large loans probably influences choice of specialty. And, how many of those without significant debt are in that fortunate position because they are FMGs? This would remove the burden from Medicare and create a more level playing field. Residents are in training but are already a more valuable resource than midlevels.

At least PAs actually have a standard course of instruction across the country. I believe most midlevels never really make it out of training because most were never properly trained in the first place.