Again, healthcare expenditure has been going up versus inflation, and physician compensation has been going down versus inflation. So if you're looking for divers of growing healthcare costs over the past decade, physician compensation isn't it.
Most actually. As a country, we've had about a 10-year run of wage growth beating inflation. This only flipped in 2021. But the compounded wage growth from ~2013 to 2021 still beats the downward trend from 2021 to now.
My apologies because I was trying to recall trends from memory, and my timescales were off. Physician wages started to decline against inflation in the 1990s. They have been outpacing inflation for the past 10 years or so, but have still not made up for the previous decline.
According to one historical physician earnings survey [1]:
> During 1987-1990, median earnings for physicians were $143,963 (interquartile range, 96,718-175,850) compared with $157,751 (IQR, 101,279-203,281) during 2006-2010 ($13,788 increase or growth of 9.6%; P < .001).
If we take the most conservative time interval (1990 to 2006) and plug it into the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator [2] we see that the median 1990 physician wage would be equal to 224,080 in 2006 dollars.
Median physician wages as of now are $229,300 (2022) according to the BLS [3] or $255,200 (2020) according to the US Center for Economic Studies [4]. Plug that into the CPI Inflation Calculator, and the 1990s median amounts to 291,509 in 2020 dollars. So yes, physicians have seen a sizable decline in real wages over the last 35 years. Americans overall saw a significant uptick in real wages in the same time period. Per capita healthcare expenditure has also gone up significantly in the same time period.
Also, when discussing physician compensation, it's important to remember that there is a very heavy rightward skew. Mean wages are not representative of the typical physician. According to the CES report [2], the mean physician wage is $343,600, while the median is $255,200. This is why you will see dramatically different "average" numbers on physician wages in different outlets -- you should always check if it is a mean or a median.
