Think very carefully before coming to South Florida. As a business prospect for an anesthesiologist, it ain’t great.
In my mind whenever you see an area that is hypersaturated with AMC, there’s a reason. In this case several.
Tons of Medicare down here. It doesn’t matter how rich these people are, they still show up at the door and present their stupid Medicare card. Depending on where you are, the population varies, but in my area there’s a ton of ultra rich, anti-VAX, Trump supporting, entitled white people. Many of them are consuming 4+ cocktails per day. Very few of them seem to be able to stay upright, hence the sheer volume of broken hips and shoulders that I do here.
In addition, I have found down here that the state of “medicine“ is quite poor. Very high nurse staff ratios, because many of the hospital corporations that operate down here are greedy AF. Hospitalists are generally marginal, although there are some stand outs.
Surgeons down here are a mixed bag. The consistently worst group that I operate with are the orthopedists. They operate all day at their private practice ambulatory centers and then they want to come and do their fractures after 6 PM. And on the weekends as well. Most of these orthopedic doctors down here care about one thing, and that’s being super rich. And many of them are.
Gastroenterologists will scope anything that has a pulse. Repeatedly. They clearly subscribe to the volume model of medicine. The hospitals tend to employ these gastroenterologists, most of them starting and a half million dollars plus per year base salary. And the expectation is that you are going to generate as many scopes as possible to justify that salary.
Now very clearly the patient population is going to vary depending on where you are. I can say very confidently that I really enjoy at least 60% of my patients. I have a number of colleagues who have been here for 15+ years, and from what they tell me salaries have never been good down here. I ask them why, and they never seem to know. My best guess is the sheer volume of Medicare, combined with collusion between insurance companies and hospitals to skim money for themselves, banking on the fact that you will so desperately want to live in Florida that you will ignore work life balance and what you are being paid.
Would love to hear what any other South Florida providers think. My experience is just my experience, and it’s not necessarily how it’s going to be in every South Florida location.
