How hospitals use salary caps to suppress physician wages

Health law attorney Dennis Hursh discusses his article, "Why hospitals are quietly capping top doctors' pay." For nearly 40 years, he has reviewed physician employment agreements and reveals a shocking recent trend: hospitals are increasingly capping physician salaries, often at the 90th or even 75th percentile of national benchmarks. Dennis explains that hospitals often justify this practice with the ludicrous claim that it prevents fraud, an argument that illogically presumes 10 to 25 percent of the top-earning physicians are breaking the law. The conversation details the legitimate reasons for high compensation—from top-tier productivity to practicing in undesirable locations—and exposes the flaw in allowing hospitals to use their own biased, in-house staff to determine "fair market value." Listeners will learn actionable advice on how to demand an independent, third-party valuation and the specific contract language needed to protect their compensation. Finally, Dennis warns how this practice has an insidious, long-term effect of artificially lowering salary benchmarks for all physicians, penalizing the very workhorses the health care system relies on.

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