State psychiatrists making top salaries
AUSTIN -- State psychiatrists are making crazy money.
Of the 100 highest paid state employees, 45 are psychiatrists, most of them employed by the state’s 10 mental hospitals.
Six state psychiatrists make base salaries of at least $200,000 – more than the commissioner of the agency that hired them.
And many make tens of thousands of dollars a year in compensatory pay, in some cases more than doubling their base salaries. The average base salary for a state psychiatrist is $150,000. The average psychiatrist makes an additional $20,000 a year for working extra hours, but some bring in ...
Comments (3)
LakesideSlacker
SO... Are they overpaid, underpaid, worth it?
mdickenson
There's a lot of waste in Texas government, but this certainly is not an example of that. The cost of these psychiatrists is $20 million a year. If we did not have them, we would see bigger costs in terms of mentally ill people being jailed, seeking care in public emergency rooms, family disfunction and violence, etc. Let's compare the costs of not treating mentally ill people to the costs of having dedicated doctors who are working round-the-clock hours to care for them.
pragmaticus
The reality of free market supply/demand meets bureaucratic politics and the idealism of equal wages for everybody.
Ignoring that reality wouldn't work too well in the military. Military physician shortages would be much worse if nobody could earn more than a general.
Ignoring that reality wouldn't work well for the U.S. presidency and the U.S. economy. Imagine what the economy would be like if nobody was allowed to make more than the president?
The notion that an organizational leader should earn the most only works if that helps the organization to prosper.
I've seen paralytic, understaffed inefficacy outside Texas where state employed clinician salaries didn't come close to market averages. Didn't help the patients much.