Study Finds Income Gap Between Primary-Care Physicians and Specialists Up to $100K Annually

Significant income and wealth gaps between primary-care and specialty physicians influence medical students' career choices and have led to a shortage of primary care physicians, according to researchers at Duke University whose findings were published in Health Affairs.

Narrowing the wealth gap between cardiologists and primary care physicians would require reducing the cardiologists' income — or increasing the primary-care physicians' income — by more than $100,000 a year, according to the researchers' analysis.

To get a sense of the disparity, the Duke researchers looked at the earning potential of cardiologists and primary care doctors between the ages of 22 and 65, allowing for medical school debt and the age at which they began earning an income, according to a Wall Street Journal report on the findings.

They found cardiologists earned more than $5 million, on average, over the course of their careers, about twice what primary care physicians earned. Both groups, however, still earned more over a lifetime than business school graduates, physicians' assistants and college graduates.

Read an abstract of the Health Affairs study.