How much can you expect to make as a surgeon?

How much does a surgeon make for one surgery?

• Lets say a heart surgeon performed open heart surgery on a patient, and the patients bill ended up being around $100,000. How much of that would the surgeon get, and how much would the rest of the people in the OR get?

• Answer:

  Here is an article that addresses that. It's not really easy reading, and you have to know a bit about how insurance works to get it, but I'll pull an example from it of heart surgery: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jskinner/documents/BirkmeyerJDMedicarePayments.pdf For a coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), the average breakdown of payments is: $100,000 is probably about what is billed in total, if not more. Average actual payment = $45,358 (what happens to the other $55k? It is written off. Nobody gets it) Paid to hospital: $31,329 Paid to surgeon: $2,712 Paid to anesthesiologist: $948 Paid to imaging dr: $357 Paid to lab dr: $98 Paid to other docs: $2,042 Total for physicians: $6,157 (13.6% of payment) Postacute care: $3,152 (medical equipment, rehab, nursing home, skilled nursing care, etc.) There are other expenses not included in here, I'm sure, but that's most of it. The hospital gets the bulk of what the insurance pays. Part of that is because the people with insurance pay for the people who have none, or choose not to pay their deductible/copayment or are in the country illegally. We still take care of all of those people, but the hospital is allowed to adjust their rates to cover those who do not pay anything. (Doctors are not allowed to do that.) Some hospitals are profitable, some are not. The hospital makes money on some surgeries and loses it on others. It costs a hospital a lot of money to do a surgery: supplies, staff costs (nurses, techs, people to sterilize instruments), instruments, etc. and heart surgery uses a LOT of resources. Hospitals have huge fixed costs (buildings, utilities, equipment) and variable costs (staffing, supplies, etc.) It's a complicated economic nightmare, really, and cannot be simplified into the finances of one surgery.