Kriton Posted June 15, 2005 Share Posted June 15, 2005 Nope, not trying to be defensive, just trying to say some truth here. Do you actually know many attorneys? I do, a lot of them - and I have heard many say, "Let's do this the most cost effective way for our clients", "Whatever is cheapest for the clients...", etc. Now I am not talking the huge international firms that charge outrageous amounts of money because they have a huge firm. I am talking about the majority of lawyers out here, the little guys, the guys that didn't walk into the family firm ripping people off from their day out of school...those firms and laywers exist, but they are not the majority. The majority of lawyers are out here trying to help mom and pop with their wills, trying to keep the cops from making cash on questionable traffic stops, trying to assist folks who can't live together any more sort out problems, and getting stiffed for their efforts. And you didn't answer my question: when was the last time you saw your doctor to provide medical services for no pay, pro bono? Attorneys here do it all the time, to the tune of thousands of hours of unpaid time, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash (mandatory and voluntary) contributions. But nobody hears any of that, or wants to frankly. I am sure there are some doctors who do volunteer their time, but I ask around, and I haven't seen or heard of any...just check it out. Board of Medical Examainers? Did you get that off tv? Do you know what steps a person has to go through to have their medical license taken away from them? DO you think that doctor who removed the wrong leg lost their license over that? Sure it won't look good on a resume, but I bet you dimes that he/she is still practicing somewhere, and suffering no doubt loads of psychological trauma because of it...hello, no legs here! I really don't know the end of that story, if you can find it, please let me know, I would be curious. I just don't have a lot of sympathy. Dozens of attorneys are put out of business here yearly. That guy in Florida went I beleive to three different states before anyone caught up with him, and he killed people - do 60 minute search, you know the story I mean! I sure hope somebody took his license. Just the reality. You know the funny part about it? Your KID gets caught messing with the next door neighbor's 16 year old, YOU get yourself into trouble, YOU screw around on your spouse and all your stuff ends up in the back yard pool, YOU fail to pay your taxes and are about to lose your house...who do you go to? Our well meaning, all caring government? Your church for guidance and support? Your mom? No...you find yourself a lawyer, those foxes in the hen house. Uh huh, what is that old saying I don't mind a crook as long as he is on MY payroll? My experience has been that there are a few who need to be taken out, but the majority are as helpful and honest as anyone I have seen. And, yes, I agree that your can subpoena Dr. records, we actually got rid of the term "duces tecum" in Texas, too complicated I guess, but the specific records from the medical inquiry is NOT subject to subpoena or discovery. And while a few contracts require the footing of costs up front, if the attorney wants to get a recovery, he/she most often foots everything; I have even heard of attorneys forwarding money to the clients up front and they will take it out of their recovery (which if it doesn't come, is money they eat). They might want to get the money out of their clients, but it doesn't happen as you have pointed out. There are also laws which, at least here, make the attorneys AND the clients responsible monetarily with damages and attorneys fees for bringing a frivolous suit as sanctions...would make me stop and think, I tell you. Who do you think is footing Jackson's legal defense, the king of pop? Please. The attorney obviously saw a chance for publicity and is footing the whole deal, glad he can do that for the king. But that makes him a publicity hound right? We have people in this country dying daily of organ failures of all kinds, here, Americans, maybe your family? But our medcial professionals (and hospitals, both of which complain of the high costs of health care, I might add) are spending millions footing the bill to surgically separate Egyptian babies, don't think that was good for publicity? But they are angels? Come on it is a business, both. Plain and simple. Anyways, sorry for the useless addition, thanks for the replies. B Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meuge Posted June 15, 2005 Author Share Posted June 15, 2005 ---------------- On 6/15/2005 3:10:45 PM Kriton wrote: And you didn't answer my question: when was the last time you saw your doctor to provide medical services for no pay, pro bono? ---------------- Medical SERVICES are expensive. But I know plenty of doctors who provide consultations for free. Actually, NYU runs a free clinic, where anyone can get free medical care if they cannot afford to pay. What do you want? Free transplant surgery? It doesn't cost a lawyer anything to take on a case, besides their time. Healthcare has many other costs associated with it. ---------------- On 6/15/2005 3:10:45 PM Kriton wrote: Board of Medical Examainers? Did you get that off tv? ---------------- He said "the medical board"... which is the organization with the authority to give and take away licenses. ---------------- On 6/15/2005 3:10:45 PM Kriton wrote: Do you know what steps a person has to go through to have their medical license taken away from them? DO you think that doctor who removed the wrong leg lost their license over that? Sure it won't look good on a resume, but I bet you dimes that he/she is still practicing somewhere, and suffering no doubt loads of psychological trauma because of it... ---------------- Do you have ANY idea what it's like to do 3 consecutive 12-hour shifts with people's lives depending on you? The medical profession places an enormous burden on the practitioners. Do you really think that a doctor who removed the wrong leg should lose his/her license over that? You must not realize how many mistakes are made then. Doctors are people too you know. Except if a lawyer makes a mistake, it can either be corrected, or appealed, etc... When a doctor makes a mistake, someone dies... or loses the wrong leg. If you took medical licenses away from every doctor who has gotten someone killed because of an honest mistake, there would be no doctors left at all. And your sarcasm with regards to the emotional trauma the doctor suffers is simply rude. Have you ever caused someone terrible suffering by simply making a mistake at your job? --------------- As for lawyers, I never said anything about them. I think that they are paid what the market will endure, and they are indeed our defense against the 'big brother', as well as overly greedy corporations. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dragonfyr Posted June 15, 2005 Share Posted June 15, 2005 Some rambling.as we seem to have fallen into the trap of comparing specific jobs rather then looking at the evolving business models... "Most non-medical faculty I know make above $50k... and quite a few make >$100k." ------------------------------------------------------------ A little market research is in order! The old days of academic tenure are over. And quite a few university professors make >$100K!? Coming from both <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 /><?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Columbia University and Vanderbilt, with extensive time spent at Lawrence Berkeley Labs at UC Berkeley, I can say that situation does not exist there! And I left academia because there were few tenure positions that anyone would want at other universities! Not if they were hired in the last 15 years they don't! With major cost cutting the tenure track jobs are either gone or on a steep decline, with the majority of teaching positions being filled on a part-time 'independent contractor' basis per class. With no benefits. And this includes the upper tier schools as well! And as the rolls of graduate schools readily indicate, if it weren't for the foreign students who constitute the majority of graduate students subsidizing the programs, a MAJORITY of the programs would literally close! Besides, the pressure is so great to pass students lest they be unable to continue to qualify for student aid that if you did fail students for cause (as in - they never showed up yet were so stupid as to never drop the class - grounds justifying failure!) you were called into the dean's office and told that you needed "to do what needed to be done" to solve the situation. In other words, if they are failed, the school suffers financial loss and the teacher becomes the source of the problem! And pursuing a doctoral program in all but a VERY limited number of areas does not provide the necessary return to justify the time and expense. I defy you to find a job for one holding a doctorate in physics! And does that take any skill or knowledge? And I could retire if I received $1 for each of the following proverbial replies from engineering companies: 1.) "Wow! Physics! That's the course that almost kept me from being an engineer", followed by 2.) "We'd love to hire you, but we don't do any physics around here!" And these are literal quotes! And I wish those quotes were simply cute jokes! And what jobs do exist are finite contract based jobs that vary with whatever political crisis spurs the shortsighted emotionally based knee jerk focus in this country! I fear this discussion has become simply one of this group against that, with exceptions to the rules being quoted as the rules! And attorney's are no more 'crooked' then doctors or postmen are! Each learns and adapts to the rules as they exist, and seldom do any of us have the opportunity to define those rules! Is the person who legally minimizes the amount of taxes they pay somehow crooked or a cheater? Of course not! They are simply playing by the rules as they exist! And if you don't like the behavior, change the rules to support a more fair and equitable system. The irony is that the military and space programs have in large measure been responsible for the basic R&D that have directly resulted in the technology that has made once heroic medical treatments routine. But after the techniques are developed, those responsible for them are deemed exotic technicians and replacements who only maintain the systems found to maintain them. And as with the case of the MRI, the folks who developed them cannot afford to utilize them! Meanwhile technicians operate them, read and interpret the scans and the doctor too often benefits by virtue of having invested in the unit with a small consortium of colleagues who also funnel their patients to the wonderfully informative units. And I won't elaborate any further in regards to this but suffice it to say that I became all to aware of this from my time at Vanderbilt. And in this discussion, it is supremely ironic that so many have commented on how athletes are over paid. It is truly ironic that they, like 'rock stars' are able to sell their services to a market that scales beyond almost any other field! While many professionals can only consult with one client at a time, a doctor can schedule 6 patients simultaneously (A fact, as that is the current model for which I have designed a HIPAA compliant secure wireless patient reporting system as well as a policy and procedures structure for utilizing 802.11i-AES, the newest (3/2004) best practices security format that replaces WEP and WPA/Wi-Fi.). But an athlete's abilities scale like a rock stars in that they can simultaneously deliver their services and entertainment to 1000's of individuals at a time more then willing to shell out absurd sums for tickets, TV, and other delivery systems! Just as musicians can sell out a stadium at >$200 average ticket prices and then profit from myriad other revenue streams! Ask U2 as Bono tells the rest of the world how deficient others are in doing things for others! But don't dare tell his manager that their ticket prices are a bit steep! The irony is they have the economy of scale on their side! Most guys with a doctorate or umpteen master's degrees don't. So examine the strategic market structure of the venture, or examine how the venture capitalizes on a monopolistic single payer business structure, or how a venture capitalizes on economies of scale. But PLEASE don't give me the tired argument that going to med school and then being paid to further on the job training while performing residency and fellowships with a substantial guaranteed future earning potential is more rigorous then any of a myriad number of disciplines that I watched med students suffer greatly with! (I can quote a best friend who bailed out of physics (because of the lack of job opportunities) after grad school and went back to med school and is now making >$140K at the University of Memphis hospital as a general attending physician 3 years out of med school. And he opted for that simply because he did not want to move again! And he passed up the additional dual PhD program and a cardiology fellowship at Vandy simply because he was TIRED of school! Despite the assurance of a >$350K salary when he finished!) This is NOT to denigrate medical students nor the profession!! But their program of study is NOT more rigorous then many other programs of study! And it is not more expensive then many other programs of study! But the job security and the financial return is substantially greater then most other areas of study! And suffering? Please! Others work for less with no assurance of any future return on their investment in time! Let along the assurance and security that their jobs will even exist! And what is the value of the price they pay in anxiety? And other graduate students incur the same school and living expenses, but a much greater payback period. So if you want to envy doctors, do so because they are in a profession where they can go anywhere and have a job, and where they will not face unemployment, layoffs, or uncertain existence of jobs or salary futures like all of the other areas of study. They work hard, and do have a degree of delayed gratification, but it does come back handsomely and surpass other avenues in a shorter period of time! But please dont play the lawyers are evil and doctors are good, or this group is honest and this group isnt! As there are far more attorneys and technical grads with exotic advanced degrees doing poorly then doctors!And no group of people are inherently more or less honest them others based upon such superficial criterion! ----------------------------- Oh! And with all due respect, I have to laugh regarding computer science being a good area to be in!!!!! You may be in one of the persistent cells currently, but the writing is on the wall for IT! After the 2001 massacre and the fact that even Gartner this past February predicts that "greater then 1/2 of ALL the remaining existing jobs (after the massacre!) will be gone in the next 10 years", and ACM and IEEE are freaking out because they cannot meet college enrollment goals by a WIDE margin and even engineering professionals are advising their children to avoid the market like the plague!? Be glad that you still have a job! But technology is consolidating and becoming more self managing! As we finally achieved what we said that we wanted! A 'free' world! And the Russians, Ukrainians, Indians, and Brazilians and Chinese want a share of that market and they are hungry, SKILLED, and willing to work for less then we are!! And China is mandating that all of their domestic systems be designed and coded for strategic reasons by CHINESE! And where are the growing markets that we are going to sell too? Hmmm... And witness the most recent international software engineering competition conducted, where the top eight teams were from the Former Soviet Union and the closest American team placed a DISTANT ninth place! And that was the team from MIT!(here is the link to the March2004 results where MIT placed 5th, Harvard 9th and then we get swallowed up in the world!http://icpc.baylor.edu/past/icpc2004/Finals/Standings04.pdf And the mathematical basis of the FSU programs is making the US programs look illiterate! Programming is/has become a commodity and with advancing systems such as virtualization (oh, and yesterday we got the new VMWare 5 free at a trade workshop - with forthcoming support for OSX!! as soon as the BIOS issues are resolved) that allows you to effectively double your productivity via virtualization - necessitating half the administrative workforce! Right now, the ONLY area where a case is being made for maintaining the workforce is in the area of security. All the rest can be outsourced more cheaply. The world's economic model has already changed. We are not in the industrial age but the information age. We se it in the evolving business models with an even more dramatic change about to occur with the coming advent of ubiquitous 24/7 high speed 'web access' ushering in the second internet revolution which will have a much greater impact then the first! So instead of complaining about who is paid more, we should be focused on the radically evolving and disruptive economic model that we are choosing to ignore, preferring instead to try to hold onto the old model much like we did the shoe and garment industry 40 years ago! So, we need to be looking to modify our business paradigm, and simply trudging along in the same manner, albeit a little faster, won't do it!<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Champagne taste beer budget Posted June 15, 2005 Share Posted June 15, 2005 Great thread, first time I've had time to read it. Lots of opinions, some of which I agree with, others, not so much. Here's my take on it... Doctors have two models to work on, Male and Female, and oher than the reproductive systems, they are essentially the same. Same legs, same throats, same elbows, same livers, etc. These two models, or shall we call it 1.2 models, since they are so similar, haven't essentially changed for the last, ohhhh.... couple thousand years or more. Other than some newer diseases, i.e. AIDS, Herpes, and what have you, they've been basically dealing with the same illnesses and maladies, broken bones, cuts, colds, alergies, heart disease, what have you, all that time. The real change has been in the equipment at their disposal to help diagnose exactly what condition a patient is affected by. This equipment isn't cheap, and the end user, the patient, ends up paying for it in the end. And the doctor profits. I don't know if it's true or not, but I remember hearing a story once that the eskimoes used to send their old, feeble residents out on an ice flow to die, and they took it as part of life. Our society, on the other hand, wants to stay alive as long as possible, so often extreme measures are taken to prolong life, even if it's not a meaningful life, just to stave off the actual act of dying. Doctors can make that happen. But it isn't cheap. Again, the patient pays, the doctor profits. If, after all is said and done, the doctor has ran every test possible, charging the patient for each one, done multiple procedures to try and save a patients life, the patient still dies, the doctor still profits. I, on other hand, am not so lucky. I have, as a best guess, over 1,000 different models to contend with. They change every year, not only the model, but the components contained within it. Sometimes there are midyear changes that aren't made known. Where one years model used to have a seperate computer for the Antilock Brake System, the next year it's built into the computer for the Supplemental Restraint System. When I left the Caddilac dealer to open this shop, I was the lead Cadillac tech, and the newest Seville could have, if fully optioned out, 24 different computers on it, each one talking to every other one by one wire with a bit parity system. You think 240 Volts is a shocker in your house? The new Toyota Prius uses over 500 volts for it's hybrid motor system. I often second guess myself and double check things that worry me about the potential to do someone serious harm, if not worse: brake systems, tire lug nuts, ball joints, steering systems, etc. Something about making sure you can steer and stop your car seems important to me. I made a decent living as a tech, but decided I didn't want to work for "The Man", I wanted to BE him, so I opened my own shop. Workmans comp, health insurance, shop insurance, they all add up, I'm making 1/4 or less now than I was working for "The Man", but I wouldn't trade it for the world. All that being said, no, I don't think doctors are overpaid. I wouldn't want their responsibility of someones life in my direction every day. I can control my destiny as to my customers safety by doing my job correctly. A doctor often isn't in control. I believe the pay scale for auto techs/shop owners will increase as fewer and fewer people want to learn the trade and go into computers/business/medical instead, but it's a slow process. I can forsee a day when independant shops will be history as vehicles get so complicated that no one can stay on top of them enough to do full vehicle coverage and the only option will be the dealership system. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kev313 Posted June 15, 2005 Share Posted June 15, 2005 Like any profession, the practice of law has good people and bad people. In my experience, it features some of the brightest, most compassionate, inquisitive and articulate people I have ever met. On a personal level, entering in the practice of law was the best decision that I ever made. Am I ever asked to do things that I find distasteful or against my own standard of "ethics" or behavior. Of course. Do I do them? Yes. Gladly. I take my responsibility as a counselor and representative very seriously. My clients are always well informed as to the consequences of their actions, possibility of success in whatever they are trying to do, and alternate options. In the end, however, I WILL do whatever what I can to execute their instructions. Every day is a challenge and an academic exercise. Every day I do something for my clients that they are absolutely unable to do for themselves. My clients have problems and lawyers are the only group of people that they can turn to. Are we overpaid? When you consider the above, the amount of time and money invested in our education, and the fact that the average yearly salary for attorneys in Illinois (where I live) is about $110,000.00, I would say NO. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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