Soaring numbers of GPs are retiring in their fifties because pension changes have made it unprofitable for them to carry on working, experts warn.
Dunno how serious it actually is but as an example of how things are connected it’s great.
So, in order not to be subsidising pension pots, something our stump dwelling scorpion insists is a very good thing to do, there’s now lifetime limits on how much you can stash away in a pension pot.
And highly paid professionals like GPs are absolutely the sort of people who will hit this limit. So, some of them are doing so and retiring.
It really is necessary, when thinking about economic or tax changes, to recall that the shine bone really is connected to the knee bone….
As fun as the pension changes are, I am willing to bet there are a whole lot of other factors at work, as there are in a lot of other professions. You could pay teachers more, for instance, and I am sure the teachers would be grateful, but improving the appalling bureaucracy would improve their lives more. Simply backing their authority in the classroom would be worth more than a significant pay rise.
Doctors have to deal with more piddling bureaucracy. It is not that they want to retire early. It is that at some point it is not worth it. But we can test this easily enough. Get some SJWs together and see if we can start a scheme which would send retiring GPs to the Third World for a while. I bet a lot of retiring doctors would be happy to spend a year in Kenya or Jamaica or Indonesia rather than retire out right.
I’ve seen a variant of this behaviour anecdotally. Some qualified doctors with children work part-time earning just under 50k a year so they keep child benefit. This gives more time with family, lower child-care costs and avoids being pressured into management roles.
“Simply backing their authority in the classroom would be worth more than a significant pay rise.”
Many teachers – think of the carey-sharey female versions in primary schools – don’t want to exercise authority.
“Some qualified doctors with children work part-time earning just under 50k a year so they keep child benefit.”
Interesting. Two-thirds of the GPs at my local practice are part-time women.
“I bet a lot of retiring doctors would be happy to spend a year in Kenya or Jamaica or Indonesia rather than retire out right.”
My GP went to Jamaica, when he retired.
Of course he was Jamaican.
And the best GP money could buy. Smoked like a chimney & drunk like a fish. Smoked a little weed, once in a while. Someone you could trust to look after your health as well as he looked after his own.
Unlike the current bunch.
Why to GP’s have to retire?
Can’t we just shoot the miserable preaching sods?
Hmmm….they could just exit the pension scheme and keep on working if they need the money. Their pay would still be a fair incentive to carry on. If they don’t need the cash then they must be living off other savings. If they are in the NHS scheme they would be expected to work until 60. Who is allowing them to retire early? I call DM BS on this one.
On the other hand, my GP recently retired, pushing 70 and he still does the odd bit of locum work even now. He looked after 4 generations of my family (grandparents, parents, me and my offspring) and was an absolute diamond.
Anecdotes, eh? Can’t trust ’em.
More anecdote (sorry!) – it’s not just pensions.
Those I know, and at precisely that stage of their careers: it’s also stifling bureaucracy, increased regulation and similar that is pushing some to retire early if at all possible.
And it’s very clear from where they are currently struggling to recruit that there are going to be more shortages.
On a slight tangent, the current junior doctor thing going on – is this not simply a consequence of having a monoponist purchaser of the labour of junior doctors?
Limiting pension accumulations drives physicians from the workforce? Who would have guessed
But what’s clearly needed is a limit on pension accumulations for government officials.
Fat chance of that ever happening, considering who would have to enact such new rules.
I don’t understand the use of ‘profitable’ in this story.
My GP recently retired. 70 YO, U.S. He said the bureaucracy and computerization got to him. It wasn’t about money; he could have retired years ago.
Would not People’s Quantitative Easing (tm Murphy) solve the problem here. Why can we not simply pay people a decent pension irrespective of their contributions? Their consumption spending would drive economic growth so everybody’s a winner.
I believe this may be one of the ideas behind the Joy of Tax, but I have yet to read it
The government keeps trumpeting that pension changes means I “must work longer!!!!11!!!”. I don’t see that self same government actually forcing anybody to actually employ me to comply with that “must work longer”.
Sorry, but as soon as I can afford to not be spending all my time trying to track down somebody prepared to get off their fat arse and actually hand over money to me in return for my services, then I’m going to stick two huge fingers up to the government and f*** off into my own life, thank you very much. Unfortunately, the way things are going, that affordability point is moving into the future faster than my ability to get people to pay me to work.
Recently retired GP in my church went to Nepal nearly a week after the earthquake (had to book flights etc) came back for a fortnight last month to collect his wife who is now teaching Nepalese lab techs medical English to help them cope with instruments manuals written in English.
When did ‘e become the stump dwelling scorpion then? I lose track of the nicknames 🙂
@PeteC – that would have been a result of my Flash Gordon stump scorpion analogy a number of weeks back 🙂