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

Can I really make a living? - Cat

Posted: Oct 20, 2011

Experienced MTs please tell me, can a person actually make a living at this. I am a newbie, working from home for the last 4 months. I am feeling very discouraged by my paychecks. I am just barely making minimum wage after working a full time schedule. I like the work, but if I can't support myself doing this what is the point? I would love to hear from those of you who have been doing this long term. Thanks.

35+ years experience and I am barely - tiredofworking

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above minimum wage; I used to average about 50K a year; those days are long gone!

I've been an MT for 35 years. When I worked - on-site as a hospital employee, -sm

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I made a comfortable living, approx. $45,000/year. Now I work for a national (one of the better ones, actually), and have seen my pay gradually, but steadily, go down, NOT up.

I'm not even sure exactly how that's happening, because currently, even though my per-line pay is the same and my line counts haven't changed, and we've had plenty of work, still my pay has dropped roughly $20 every 2-3 months. My last check was down in the $400's, which is exactly half my rent. I'm single, self-supporting (for now...), and in my early 60s. So far I'm barely squeaking by, and that's because I have to raid what's left of my savings every month to pay the bills that my MT pay doesn't cover. Once the savings is gone (at this rate it'll be about 2 more years), I will then be in deep doo-doo.

I like doing medical transcription. It's the one thing I'm really good at, too. But there just seems to be no way to ever get ahead in this field.

Unless some MAJOR SHAKEUPS come down the pike in future, I don't think it will get any better. As long as they can get away with sending the work offshore, they can get away with paying us peanuts for what we do.

work from home - ab

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I really want to start working from home ASAP. will someone please send me in the right direction

The whole "work at home" deal is a TRAP. - Dont do it if you dont have to! nm

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I love working at home and wouldn't do anything else if I can help it - nm

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nm

Lots and lots of variables and - many different answers

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I am four years into this career and I'm making a living supporting myself. My first year was barely minimum wage, though, but it got progressively better after that with just a couple of bumps in the road.

There are a lot of people who are making a very decent living and there are a lot who are not. There are any number of variables that go into it, such as VR, pay rate, ease of platform, how well the VR is managed, whether or not you have a fixed set of accounts or if you are jumped around from account to account.

For my situation, I am on a straight typing account and I get paid just under 9 cpl and I average 300 lph in production. I haven't yet found a job doing VR where I ever got up to 600 lph to make up for the decrease in pay, so that is a HUGE factor in people's checks nowadays.

You CAN make a living at this. Your first year is going to be rough because you're still in so much of a learning curve. If you can afford to stick with it though and are not in danger of losing the roof over your head, then I say stick with it and you will start to get better and faster and make more income.

Not with VR, no matter what the MTSOs tell you. - Debbie Hoodwink

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Pay no attention to that MTSO behind the curtain!

300 lph - no way for me - My oven is broken - there goes thanksgiving

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I've been doing MT for 15 years. Now working for a national. Pay for headers & footers have been cut from our earnings. If I want to be accurate - and I do - there is no way I can make even 200 lph any more. These are not the same doctors, report after report. They don't say the same things over and over, so there goes the speed. We don't get paid for formatting text, such as bold, underline etc. We don't get paid to look up doc's names or addresses that the docs are too busy to dictate. I used to make $55k/year as an IC, but self-employment taxes and health insurance took out all my profit. Now, I have health insurance at a minimal cost but I, too, am living off my savings. $24k/year is just not enough and yes, that is full-time. I feel that we ARE specialists but are getting paid like secretaries; maybe even less than they make. I sometimes feel that companies are using "the economy" as an excuse to cut, cut, cut our earnings. In about 5 months, all my savings will be gone. I have holes in my clothes and I never go anywhere. I don't have money to visit my kids in another state, even tho they are having babies. Living like a recluse and very depressed. What will all these companies do when we all just up and quit?

The thing is, we all won't just "up and quit". They - do need us, we SM

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are the ones who clean up the VR and the work from India and make it acceptable. Can you imagine if all the US MTs quit? I so wish it could happen.

Everyone has a breaking point. I think lots of us - are just about there. When the -sm

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job gets so bad, and when the pay goes beyond the ridiculous (where it is now) to the super-ridiculous (where it's headed), American MTs, young and old alike, may very well walk off the job en masse.

I would love that. What I would also love would be if my prayers were answered, and US companies all get taxed up the whazoo for each job they send offshore. To the point where even a highly-paid and benefitted US MT would be a bargain compared to having to pay twice that, or three times that, to hire an Indian worker.

Then would come the fun part. By then, so many US MTs would have left the profession altogether, that those still remaining would be in high demand, and could end up having companies bidding against each other to hire them on.

Oops, I just woke, up. Darn! That was a great dream I was having!

-Meerkat

Problem is, so many MTSO are NOT US companies. They - are OS owned, foreign companies. nm

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x

300 lph - no way for me - cindy

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Yes, you are right. I've been doing this since 1984, I stopped subcontracting for the same reason, too high self employment taxes and work for nation MTSO. If our fingers aren't moving on the keyboard we aren't making a penny. Used to the line count was enough to cover our taxes, our insurance, and now it is just not enough. We don't get paid for stopping to look up anything. We don't get paid for sending e-mails to the company everytime we have a problem with a report or any time we spend doing something related to the job. We are getting ripped off. I am already in school and already finished 1 of my classes, and I also cannot wait to get out of this ripped off business. If my husband didn't have extra money I would have gone under a long time ago. He paid for my new schooling, but he didn't really think I would do it and my sister said you must really be getting paid bad to be changing to something that years ago may have seemed below transcription and I was in a higher position than that, but I cannot wait to get a job where my fingers aren't on the keyboard to get a paycheck. I suggest you all find something better. The more overtime you do for the company the more tired you get and what is overtime anyway, I think I get an extra penny a line. WOW! I'm gonna get rich on that. At least a 12.00 hour job, if I do overtime I get time and a half. Not just an extra penny. By the way I think secretaries get paid way better than we do. Maybe one day we will all get up and walk, call in sick, etc. Good luck with whatever you do. We all know there is no raises from these MTSO companies, so what we start at is what we stay at. 8 cents per line in 2004, and 8 cents per line in 2011.

Cat - Old Pro

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I need more data to intelligently answer your question. Where did you go to school? In general, there is a HUGE learning curve, and perhaps that it what you are experiencing. It might be sobering to note that I made than half this year than what I made in the 90s. That is when I decided to retire. Good luck to you.

Quite frankly? No. Get out now. nm - nm

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nm

Here's a couple of ways to know if you are one of the ones who will make it - See message

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It comes down to just a couple of things:

Do you have the keyboarding skills to be able to produce enough work to make money. By the time you leave school, your keyboarding speed needs to be at least 60 wpm. I've seen some good MTs who weren't very fast, and 60 isn't fast at all, but it's a solid speed. Less than that isn't.

Another requirement is that you got really good training. Adequate won't work. There are MTs who have worked for years doing things the wrong way according to what the employers want now, not 20 years ago. They aren't making it either. Your training has to have been exceptionally good. For example, if you didn't do huge, enormous amounts of transcription practice using the SUM program followed up by some sharp instructors to point out your deficiencies, your work potential will suffer. One way to tell this is, how well did you know your instructor? Did you know you had an instructor but that's about it? Were you able to ask questions? Did you get good, thorough answers to those questions? Did you get job placement assistance when you finished, or did they just charge you extra to show you how to create a resume?

You will also have to be able to take criticism, not just take it, but take it cheerfully, and learn from your mistakes. You need to make sure that you never make the same mistakes again, because mistakes cost you time, which is money. Again, there are experienced MTs who will spend their time arguing that they are right instead of doing it the way the employers want it. They aren't going to do more than just survive in today's MT work environment.

Finally, you have to have a really good work environment with few-to-none interruptions and distractions, and the motivation to get there on time and do your work when you said you would and the way you said you would, alerting your friends, neighbors, and relatives that when you are working, you are working!

A couple of ways - Old Pro

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You have stated what is necessary in a very articulate, wise manner. I like your style. I would only add that I hope people would go to real schools and not the "institutes" and such that ply their ads in women's magazines or that romp around the country giving infomercial-type seminars. A good way to check out a school or "university" is to Google the words: "ACME (or whatever the school's name is) and fraud." Or: "THE SCHOOL'S NAME and scams." It can be a very revealing little test of whether a school is really legit.

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