Money For Nothing!

Oh what a tease! Earlier this year it was widely reported that ‘top GPs’ could earn up to £250,000’. Dr Informed is widely renowned as a top GP, so he was more than justified in anticipating a few extra pennies in recognition of his all round ‘good-eggness’, especially as he has been victorious for the past two years running in the local BMA division’s stroke play golf competition.

You can therefore imagine that it has come as something of a shock to find out from the BBC that this year he will only get £106,000. He wishes he’d known this before he’d let Mrs Informed run amuck in the local Range Rover dealership, and wishes that the BBC would think before simply regurgitation any old figures that it gets told.

If one looks at this figure for the ‘average GP’, it translates to roughly £50 per registered patient per year before tax, a figure your private dentist must be going green with envy over. Not only that, but working only 45 hours per week before admin and paperwork leaves the majority of one’s time free to play golf*. The charmed life doesn’t finish there, as us GPs also have the added benefit of running and administrating our own businesses, paying our own staff and often having large mortgages on our premises. We also have the great comfort of knowing that the government can effectively gift our business to large foreign ‘Healthcare’ companies any time it so chooses.

So, when one looks at it objectively, £106,000 pounds is really still an obscene amount of money. Even Dr Informed doesn’t think that his 6 years of university, three degrees, 6 years in hospitals doing 100 hour weeks and a decade or so of looking after a few thousand people makes him worth in a year what most Chelsea Footballers earn in a fortnight. Neither does he consider himself the equal of ‘management consultants’ because it takes a special type of person to do that job when they could actually be running their own successful business, as opposed to helping organisations like the NHS in such a selfless and highly valuable way.

I want my, I want my, I want my MTV......


*Assuming that sleep and family are optional.