The Twilight of Cardiac Surgery in America
in Health ·
shadowfalcon33 said:If you're looking to make serious money, you shouldn't have picked medicine in the first place. Besides, nobody is stopping a cardiac surgeon from opening a private practice and charging whatever they want for heart surgeries.
Furthermore, that "pitiful" $7k-$9k range represents two average American salaries—that’s not nothing.
The reasons why there aren't enough pediatric cardiac surgeons are way more complicated than just "nobody wants to do it."
Seriously? A cardiac surgeon opening their own private practice??? Give me a break...
To perform cardiac surgery, you actually need a hospital setting because these patients require extended stays—we're talking days or weeks, not just one or two nights in a bed.
In other words, you would need... at the very least...
a cardiac surgeon, an anesthesiologist, an anesthesia nurse, a surgical tech, and a night nurse. That is just the basic surgical team...
On top of that, according to current US regulations—if I recall correctly—to open a facility, you'd need at least 30-something rooms, an organized ER, and a morgue... so now you have to staff the ER, which means hiring several doctors and medical technicians just to cover the basics... by the time you finish building all that, paying all those salaries, and equipping everything (and medical equipment is anything but cheap), you'll realize how thin the margins are. Plus, there aren't even that many people with enough liquid cash to opt for private surgery anyway... I don't see a positive ROI here at all. And as far as I know, Ecclestone's daughters aren't interested in medicine, so there's no way their dad is footing the bill for all of this...
And for that "pitiful" $7-$3000 someone has to endure six grueling years of med school, a year of residency, four years of general surgery for cardio, and then who knows how many more sub-specializations within cardiology. Basically, if everything goes perfectly according to plan, you're 33 years old. So please, don't lecture me about average American salaries when you could just as easily talk about the average level of American education—not to mention the sheer amount of studying involved.