(Student loan payment moratorium extended to Aug 31)
Every week I find a few great articles I feel are especially valuable. Following are this week’s best. I hope you find them as useful as I did.
This week’s favorites include what recent event gave me goosebumps, never have a mortgage when you retire, nurses are quitting due to the recent homicide conviction because of a medication error, it’s more expensive for a medical system to use a NP or a PA than to hire a physician, and a review of The Doctors Guide to Navigating a Financial Crisis.
Happy reading!
This first recommendation is a podcast. I was a guest on Uwe Dockhorn’s Liberating Lifestyles where I discussed the event that recently gave me goosebumps. We also discussed how I was able to manage 64 rental units while practicing general surgery full time. If you have investment real estate and it feels like a second job, you desperately need my course on Automating Your Real Estate Investments.
Many people worry about whether they have enough money and passive income sources to last throughout their retirement. I know I had this worry when I retired from medicine. Having your home paid off will greatly improve the power of your retirement savings, since a very large sum of money is required to generate enough income to make the mortgage payments. Super Saving Tips shares how he learned the hard way that You Should Never Have a Mortgage When You Retire. If you need more information on why retiring with a mortgage is a bad idea, be sure to read my award-winning book, The Doctors Guide to Eliminating Debt.
I recently posted an article about a nurse who was convicted for homicide in a medication error resulting in a patient’s death. Here is a follow up from Medscape on Why Nurses are Raging and Quitting After the RaDonda Vaught Verdict. Do you think it is right for someone to go to prison for making a medication error? The medical personnel who are quitting because of this verdict feel they could easily make a medication error, or any other error for that matter, and don’t want to risk going to jail for the mistake. Imagine what it would do to the supply of physicians if instead of malpractice claims, they faced jail time when a patient died.
Employing medical provider who collect a lower salary than physicians has become very popular lately. It seems on the surface that letting nurse practitioners and physician assistants see the patients instead of hiring the more expensive physicians would be a way to save a healthcare system money. It turns out not to be the case as we learn in this study published by the AMA. While it is true money is saved in salaries, money is lost overall. It’s no surprise that NPs and PAs cannot provide the same level of care and expertise as physicians and due to multiple factors detailed in the article, ends up driving up the overall cost of care. Maybe this is the wakeup call. A better educated provider (physician) saves money over all.
Even though things are now opening up, we still find physicians in crisis. Many want to quit medicine having been put through the wringer the last two years. B.C. Krygowski penned a nice review of the book, The Doctors Guide to Navigating a Financial Crisis. If you face a disaster such as a sudden job loss, this book will lead the way to your financial recovery.
I hope you enjoy these articles as much as I did. I look forward to updating you again next week with a few more articles I find especially interesting. If you read an especially good article, send me the link so I can share it with others.
