Even if pay continues to drop, it’s unlikely the salary will ever fall to what a hospitalist would make ($240k), due to the nature of the work. If you take a look at markets like chemical engineering for example, the job market is complete **** with almost 30% of graduates not finding jobs as engineers, but the pay has always been high due to the technicalities of the work. What makes EM worse is that physicians are for the most part interchangeable. There is a huge gap between a good ChemE and a bad one, but all board certified EM physicians are expected to be proficient enough.
More likely what will happen is EM employers will keep salaries above $280k but make the work much more difficult, with unreasonable demands like signing NPs charts. If you don’t keep up, they can easily fire you and get someone younger or more desperate. Physicians will be either forced to move cross country every few years, retire earlier or there will be a growing number of physicians who are underemployed working at UCs or part-time gigs.