Pay rises for Doctors

This article interested me today:

http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article3115515.ece

It talks about family doctors in the UK. Apparently they are paid a lump sum to manage their practices. After hiring staff, and other running costs, they keep the rest to themselves. Sounds fair, but apparently not. Because, doctors have been running their practices for cheaper and pocketing the difference. Shock! Horror! This means that their average salary has increased on average by 10% in the last year.

Furthermore, the writer of the article expresses disbelief as to how this could have happened:

"You might expect bankers to increase their profit margins but it is hard to understand how it could happen with doctors."

WHY? Why is it so hard to believe that a doctor would want more money? Are doctors removed from society? Are they not vulnerable to the same forces that others are? What we no doubt see in society is a more money orientated culture. People are no longer content to provide services for the intrinsic pleasure of it. They want money for it. People write books, not only for the pleasure of entertaining people, they want multi-million dollar book deals.

If these forces are affecting all people in society, it is without doubt that they will affect doctors. And they are. And why shouldnt they be affected. Its a rosy, nostalgic view that doctors are kind hearted souls doing it for the love of patients. Rubbish. Doctors choose to do medicine because:

1. Its supposed to be a secure job.
2. It is the degree smart people are expected to study
3. Peer pressure
4. Parental Pressure
5. Prestige and Status
6. Supposed financial returns

What doctors do discover once they graduate, is that the jobs are no longer secure. Patients are more likely to complain than thank them. And their friends who scraped through university with a classics degree are now making four times more than them working in the City.
And doctors want to live in nice houses, and drive nice cars, and society's perception of them is that they should because they are high earning doctors.

So when the writer of the article speculates:

"It suggests that the sums injected into general practice, and the rest of the NHS, over the past five years – £45bn extra in total – have been so huge that they have been beyond the capacity of the average doctor to spend, and so have ended up in their pockets by default."

They have really missed the point. It is easy to see why doctors will try and grab as much money as they can. They are just like everyone else.