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Ophthalmology LASIK Salary


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Yea if it's private, i.e. body waxing, breast enhancement, Lasik, cosmetics, then I don't care if they make so much money, that's their business. That's just like telling the owner of a salon that he gets too much money for the amount of work he puts in. As long as there's people willing to pay for their services, it's a business and you can't do anything about it.

 

But if the government is using everyone's taxes to reimburse them unfairly for the amount of work they're doing, then that should be changed.

 

You have it exactly right. It's one thing for people like derms/rads docs to milk the system by churning out half-assed diagnoses or chart readings, in effect taking advantage of a system that can't correct for this sort of moral hazard. But the salary that LASIK surgeon is determined by the market. They're not making money due to an inefficiency in accountability - people are willing to pay the money - and the prices are set by the market. Can't argue with that. If other people are willing to do the procedure for less, they're welcome to lower the prices.

 

Now, that said - there is the issue of market entry which Muse brought to light, which does pose a difficulty. If LASIK surgery can indeed be done by non-ophthalmologists (a contentious issue), then perhaps this represents an inefficiency in the system. However, part of me seriously doubts that people would rather pay less for a family doctor (to say nothing of a technician and a computer) to do a surgery as important as eye surgery.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I wouldn't have been comfortable with a family doc before having the procedure done, but literally right after I was like, "this guy gets paid a million a year for that... the computer did all the work," all he did was anaesthetize my eye and make a slight incision. If I had to do it again I'd gladly have a family doc who specializes in doing 30 Lasik surgeries a day do the surgery, it's not as if you're using 95 percent of the skills you learned in optho residency, you do the same thing over and over again.

 

It's like cosmetic GP's versus dermatologists, I don't mind going to a GP to get some cosmetic work done... if that's all he does, he might be even more skilled than the derm! On the contrary if I have a weird skin condition I need diagnosed, I'll be making an appointment to see a dermatologist.

 

Now, that said - there is the issue of market entry which Muse brought to light, which does pose a difficulty. If LASIK surgery can indeed be done by non-ophthalmologists (a contentious issue), then perhaps this represents an inefficiency in the system. However, part of me seriously doubts that people would rather pay less for a family doctor (to say nothing of a technician and a computer) to do a surgery as important as eye surgery.

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I've seriously always wondered the same thing myself, what's the limiting factor that keeps residency programs in general from training more dermatologists and ophthalmologists?

 

its not a real market when the supply (#of incoming residents) is set by the specialty themselves. I actually have no idea how the residency spots are set...
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I've seriously always wondered the same thing myself, what's the limiting factor that keeps residency programs in general from training more dermatologists and ophthalmologists?

 

My understanding is that residency is just a very expensive for the system and the provinical governments set the limits on how many are trained overall to contain costs. One CMA article I read for instance set the training cost for a neuro surg at 500,000 a year. Not sure what the cost for an ophthalmologist would be but it wouldn't be cheap I would think :)

 

Relatedly the reason they cannot just open up a lot more med school spots as more to do with making sure there are in the end residency spots than the cost of adding more people into in the actual degree. Same logic for foreign trained doctors -

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