Occupy…Your Doctor’s Office? - The Wealth Report - WSJ

By Robert Frank

One of the ideological triumphs of the Occupy movement was to convince America that Wall Street was the 1%, and the 1% was Wall Street.

Associated Press

It made for such a clean argument, and the perfect protest location. Taxpayers bailed out Wall Street, Occupiers pointed out. The bankers’ gain was America’s loss (also true). Since Wall Streeters are rich, it only follows that that the gains of the 1% over the past 30 years have also been at the expense of the rest of America.

Yet the idea that the 1% are mostly bankers is flat out wrong.  The fact is, if the Occupiers wanted to protest the 1%, they would be better off showing up at their local hospital.

A recent chart in the New York Times showed that of all the occupations, the one with the largest share of one-percenters was physicians.  Fully 27% of physicians are one-percenters. That compares with only 10% for “financial specialists.”

According to research by economists Jon Bakija, Bradley Heim and Adam Cole, medical professionals accounted for 16% of the 1% in 2005. “Professionals in finance” accounted for 14%.

In other words, doctors outnumber finance professionals in the 1% – both as a share of the occupation and their share of the total.

This doesn’t suit the Occupy movement, of course. Would the media or voters have sympathy for protestors hoisting placards reading: “Occupy Your Orthopedist” or “Unite Against Plastic Surgeons!”

The medical profession, certainly, has its share of corruption, fraud, greed and over-compensation –  sometimes at the expense of taxpayers through Medicare and Medicaid. Most voters would agree that medical costs have soared far too high, often benefitting the doctors.

Yet using doctors to protest inequality would be a losing proposition. Bankers make for much better targets – even if they’re a smaller slice of the 1%.

Do you think doctors should be targeted as one-percenters?

via blogs.wsj.com