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Comment by ejstronge | Hacker News Reader

Residents are not fully qualified physicians, so it does make sense that they cannot bill for their work.

Further, residents, by and large, are paid for by Medicare.

> While they may provide value in other ways, they are viewed as cost on the balance sheet.

Are you saying that replacing residents with physicians would be more advantageous to hospitals? I don't have a sense of the numbers or billing processes involved

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no, Im saying if it costs 200k to train a physician, They should include that in the cost of their in what they charge for their licensed physicians. It is basically how it works in every other job in the world that requires on the job training or licensing.

I again don’t have a sense of how this works, but the activities performed by a resident are overseen by a qualified doctor. Eventually, the residents are able to supervise other residents and only consult the qualified doctor for important matters.

This would seem to increase the potential productivity of a hospital. So I am confused by why you say residents are a cost on balance sheets (again, considering that their pay comes from Medicare/Medicaid)

Hospitals claim that residents take more work than they do, and that hospitals would loose somewhere between 75-100k/year on each resident if the federal governments didn't pay them. I think this is likely bullshit, but if if it is true, that still doesnt mean the government paying for residents is a good solution. Employers take a loss all the time to train worker in other industries, and there are many ways for them to recoup their losses.

> Residents are not fully qualified physicians, so it does make sense that they cannot bill for their work.

Residents are actually more qualified than many other "mid level" professions aka Medical Providers.

Would I rather see a resident, or a nurse practicioner? The resident of course, because he/she actually completed medical school, whereas an NP may have a nursing oriented (no emphasis on diagnosis) masters or terminal degree.

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