A community of 30,000 US Transcriptionist serving Medical Transcription Industry

Do you know anyone in healthcare field other than MTs whose - incomes are going backward?

Posted: Jul 16, 2012

Unit clerks, physical therapy aides, central service techs, radiology techs, housekeeping...anyone but us?

And the main difference is - we work at home alone, disorganized and unable to do anything for ourselves. They know this, and they exploit it.

hospital - housekeeping, ROI, medical billing, payroll - Des

[ In Reply To ..]
Housekeeping is steadily being outsourced to companies who offer reduced benefits and lower pay. (personally witnessed)

Release of information clerks are also being outsourced to companies who offer reduced benefits and lower pay. (personally witnessed)

Billing and payroll are on this list, too, though I don't know of anyone personally who could tell me if their benefits and pay were decreased.

My husbands benefits were decreased. - Hes a mechanic, and ...

[ In Reply To ..]
He lost his 401K match, they took away the paid lunch break, he lost his christmas bonus (1500 per year) and safety bonus (500 per year), and summer bonus (1000 per year). They stopped doing christmas parties (which were extensive hotel parties) and the insurance has gone completely thorugh the roof! Five years ago, we had a $25 deductible to go to the doc. Now, we have a $12,000 deductible and they only cover 80% after that, and it costs $98 a week for the premiums.

I would say that counts!

many other industries - not just us

[ In Reply To ..]
my husband works for ADM and they have done across the board cuts from the highest paid workers to the lowest paid workers, lost overtime, bonuses, and yes Christmas bonuses - they used to pay for a trip to the movies for the entire family but cut that.

I have a friend who works in radio research and his pay was cut $10,000 a year just to keep his job that he is fearing he will be outsourced in the next year as well.

another friend in-house in coding/analysis they are getting revamped and many jobs cut as well.

Not that it helps that much but a least we know it's not just MT's.

I know... just recently heard a piece on the - radio talking about people in

[ In Reply To ..]
real estate and other sales, IT, even engineering. I am just glad to have had a job through all this, and even though I am making less now than I used to, I have been learning to live with less for a long time, so it has not affected me too much.

A lot of companies have created college "internships" - that are really unpaid clerical SM

[ In Reply To ..]
positions. The company gains by not having to hire clerical workers for those positions, while the unemployed clerical workers eat dirt and the interns are royally cheated. They get to work for free at low-level positions, NOT the jobs internships are supposed to expose them to. They go along, though, because allowing themselves to be cheated is a way in for them these days.

A lot of engineers these days work in cubicles staring at computer screens just like data entry clerks. Pay for many is either stagnating (as company profits soar) or dropping substantially.

And so on. Pick an industry, any industry these days, and you'll find vast numbers of citizens who've allowed themselves to be reduced to the status of laborers and consumers to be used to generate profits for others. This is in our country, the United States, where 300,000,000 people are working hard to make a fraction of the rest wealthy and powerful beyond our imagining. (BTW, the power and BIG money? It's actually held by 1% of the 1%.)

Welcome to Democracy, our version. I'm so proud, just don't know how I'm going to explain it to my grandsons in another decade or so.

Low paid workers - Sweets

[ In Reply To ..]
The air traffic controllers in the USA have also seen their jobs decimated. Newly hired trainees are hired at $17,000 (yes, that is correct) and then their pay goes up to $33,000. The huge salaries that you hear about are only in management. The rank and file controllers used to make $75,000 and upwards. The controllers hired today will only top out at perhaps $40 to $50,000.

My husband is counting down the hours to retirement in Oct 2014 and trains new controllers. They require 4 year degrees or equivalent experience. These are well trained and intelligent people and thy are paid less than retail clerks while in training. They can't keep people.

In return, some airports are contracting out air traffic control jobs, and the federal workers are out on the street. We saw it where we live. Some people had less tha 1 year to retirement, but they lost their retirement benefits. I am surprised the media does not do a report on this, but guess it will only happen after a major breakdown in the system.

MTs and the current average pay scale - MT

[ In Reply To ..]
I appreciate the responses regarding pay cuts and what is happening in other fields, but I think the OP was specifically asking about those in healthcare with the responsibilities we have for accuracy, correcting physician errors, etc. and pay "going backward", i.e., as much as the minimum wage pay cut some have had.

Speaking for myself, I made more, 50%+ more, when I started my first transcription job in the 1980s in my early 20s. I'm one of the few who work for a good company I like very much, but pay is low-average. I personally cannot think of another position in the healthcare industry, again, with the responsibilities we have and the knowledge required that has gone this far "backward."

MTSOs pay/lease to use expensive VR programs. Yet, the worse these programs are, the more WE are penalized monetarily (more time correcting). The more fastidious WE are (researching, looking up addresses, cc to physicians, garbled pronunciations of medications, Googling a new oncology protocol just approved yesterday, patient names - my accounts do not have a database so I literally am on WhitePages.com all day to try to figure them out - etc.), the more WE are penalized (not paid for this). The more time we spend that is not on the keyboard to ensure a medical document is accurate because WE care, the more we are penalized. It makes no sense.

And look at this board. If you vent, you are a "whiner." If you make good money, you are so paranoid that you refuse to share where you work OR you work two jobs and think that's "normal" OR you have your own accounts and never take a vacation.

All jobs that don't require a 4-year degree and many - that do are seeing income drops. Many SM

[ In Reply To ..]
degreed positions have seen steady increases in income at the same time. There is a widening schism in this country between the haves and have-nots.

OP was looking for support for the notion that we're mostly alone in our victimization. This simply isn't so--to a truly spectacular degree, although certainly the flow into this particular at-home field of an overly large percentage of housewives working for play money and of *feckless people who've never been willing or able to support themselves decently at any work has had a definite impact.

*Feckless: Lacking efficiency or vitality. Weak, ineffective. Unthinking and irresponsible.

BTW, thoughtful discussion of mutual problems is discussion.
Whining,
Compassion,
Malice,
Decency,
Slander,
Manners
Irresponsible,
Knowledgeable,
Ignorant as a bag of rocks.

We may not be able to rattle definitions for these off the tops of our heads but we all know them for what they are. No matter what mask some try to hide behind.

We had an opportunity years ago to convince the marketplace we were worth more - Ship Has Sailed Because of Our MT Leaders

[ In Reply To ..]
I've been a member of AHDI formerly AAMT for many years. It used to be run by very smart people who had the ability to "market" and promote us as professionals. Somewhere down the line I noticed that Claudia, our AAMT CEO, went a different direction, leaving us behind. Other leaders of our organization, the only organization we have that could have worked for us, worked against us. They moved to India and other countries because it was expedient for them. They made money by selling us out.

We had a chance back then. We were sold out. Now the only thing we can hope to do is change the way our marketplace looks at us. Never again should we trust others to have our best interests at heart. They let us down, to put it mildly. Yes, they are successful, brilliant women, and it was easy to convince us that they "knew best" for us, but that wasn't their goal. We learned the hard way. It wasn't just Claudia. It was others who saw big $$$ signs (for themselves) and went for it. We just can't expect that anyone else is going to come in for the right reasons. We are on our own.

Pay scale - On site MT

[ In Reply To ..]
CNAs and MAs who are expected to do the work of an RN and are not paid much more than minimum wage. Compared to the responsibility they are given, checking for accuracy and correcting dictation errors seems pretty trivial. I am not going to share where I work, it's and on site job at a place you would never have heard of, and we're not hiring. I'm not going to tell you how much I get paid because that is my private business.

Another USELESS post of nothing - GoodMT

[ In Reply To ..]
I swear people just get their form of exercise in typing repetitions. {shrug}

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