This is hardly news, is it?
Average GP Partners salaries are now £114,000 a year, as against £56,000 in 2001. Adjust that for the fact the average working week is now 36.3 hours, not 43.1, that's equivalent to a payrise of 130%.
The generic headline "Government allows taxpayer to get conned out of billions by rent-seeking monopoly for umpteenth time" would cover it.
Put On Your Big Boy Pants, Maybe?
3 hours ago
5 comments:
They didn't even seek the fricking rent ... the government just threw the money at them!
What "ob" says...
I remember reading "Crippen's" blog at the time and he reckoned that GPs couldn't believe their luck at the deal they were being almost forced into accepting.
I've been thinking about GP's salaries. Firstly I need to point out that Mrs Lola is a teacher in a state school.
Thing is GP's might well be worht £117K. The point is that no-one knows.
They work for monopoly. There are no price signals that would indicate their value as set by their patients. I mean how much would you value a GP that saved your life?
So the problem is the state monopoly health care system. It sets prices by bureaucratic rationing. There is no market. It is very inneficient.
Which brings me on to Mrs Lola. By any measure I know that she is an exceptional teacher and very productice. She puts up with ore crap in a day than I would tolerate for 1 hour. Her pay is poor. She works for a monopoly and is represented bya staff association that is more interested in its own future than hers.
The answer to checking the value of GPs and better pay for Mrs Lola? Privatisation.
Lola,
The main thing is that the number of years to be a GP acts as a barrier to entry.
It keeps GPs who are often poor at diagnosis in jobs. I had more luck getting a medical problem solved with a massage therapist, Google and a dentist than I did with 3 GPs and an ENT specialist.
I would change the whole system and have a lower qualification which was specific to general practise (in the same way that pharmacy is).
G, P, I have a sneaking suspicion that you are right. Which is even more depressing.
L, TA, I think we are agreed that in the medium term all this would be sorted out by replacing NHS and State education with taxpayer funded vouchers, as a sort of half-way house.
As a point of interest to economists, I have been planning for a while to do a post explaining that subsidy junkies have to campaign on two fronts - on the one hand they have to justify the subsidies and on the other they have to raise barriers to entry, in the absence of which the value of the subsidies would be competed away by new entrants. Only I never quite got round to it.
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