Many of the good doctors cannot afford malpractice insurance anymore. Yes, they may make 150,000 but a lot of this is needed for overhead and insurance. Students are choosing not to go into medicine. Computer programing, business and other jobs where they make good money and they are not responsible for life and death situations and have no reason for malpractice insurance.
Doctors offices are disappearing. Physicians are working now for hospital conglomerates who are charging a crap load of money for a simple office call. Afterall, everyone needs their cut of the money including insurance companies. Who pays? The ill. Who’s out of a job? Many good physicians. The result? The price of a simple office call has risen 500% in the last 8 years. Go figure.
What's also happening are these "pay for performance" deals where staff doctors are not paid a salary in the second year, they are paid by "relative value units" (RVUs) based on what they did in the first year. You did this number of procedures, you had this many referrals, you brought up the revenue of your department by this much percent.
I was seeing a local doc for primary care. A few months ago, he announces he's moving to a practice in another state. I asked his nurse if he was selling his practice--and she said, "No, because nobody wants to buy a single doc practice these days."
It's much more than malpractice insurance. I cite my BIL as an example......
He's an Oncologist who was a member of a specialty group and was responsible for purchasing all the chemo therapy drugs for his patients, most of whom were medi-gap and medicare recipients.......
Unfortunately for him, the govt. was not reimbursing him for the full costs of the drugs he had to administer (in the tens of thousands of dollars) to his patients and he was forced to drop out of the group and go on staff to the hospital he was working out of.......