If U R making 40-45K/year for working half-days,

• Is it just me... or am I the only one - unsureMT
  • No, things are great. Don't let it get you down. SM - Sally Forth
    • If U R making 40-45K/year for working half-days, - what do you get paid per line?
    • Would be nice wouldn't it? Oh sm - 85-90
  • stick around for the networking...ignore the doom and gloom...sm - flybye
    • Excellent, supportive comment, Fly. :) nm - Ella (retired)
  • At the top of the Company Board is posted ....s/m - ==
  • Look at it this way.............. - mole hill....... nm
    • Thanks, mole hill... you are right... - unsureMT
  • oh brother... - MT2
    • i can use my real name to tell you that you are a hateful person MT2...so THERE! - gretchen
      • Gretchen - MT2
        • i did, made me smile...i sure am pretty ;) - gretchen
          • Well, Gretchen, I'm old and ugly, but agree...sm - Ella (retired)
    • That's all I needed to know.. Thanks for the advice. - unsureMT

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In my exeprience, it has been MT friendly.  I did have some start up issues because of Vista, but that was easily resolved if you get a cust. svc rep with a little knowledge.  My issue was with getting word to run inside of the scribe program like it was supposed to.  It kept opening outside of scribe.  By Vista being so new to the platform, It was registry problem that needed some tweeking. 

IC's risk being considered an employee if they work only for one company. I had a friend with an MTSO that the IRS went after because some of her MT's worked only for her. 

Incorporation was a benefit to me because my business was making money, yet I was paying self-employment taxes on what my business was making. For example, if I have 3 IC's working for me, who bring in $40,000 per year, that is what my BUSINESS is earning, not me and therefore I should not be paying self-employment taxes on my business earnings. So I incorporated, paid myself a small salary for running the business on which I DO pay self-employment tax, and took the rest of the earnings as an S corp. They go right through to my personal taxes but I save the 15% SS tax, which as you can see on 40K, saves me $6 grand per year right there. Also enjoy 401K contributions from my corp, and increased deduction for health insurance.

would not recommend incorporating if making less than 50K per year with a business as there are increased fees and corp taxes too.

Regarding the prior post who said "For insurance, for professional liability insurance, I was told that you have to be incorporated. I don't have a problem with this. If I hired someone to build an addition for me, I would want him/her to have insurance. Why should medical records be any different?"

Medical records are different because the MT carries essentially zero liability. Insurance insures against lawsuits. MT's lawsuits are nearly nonexistent. Many, many, MANY MT's do not carry professional liability insurance. The analogy of a construction company putting on an addition is not equivalent to the MT situation. It would be like asking if your neighbor carries liability insurance against your contractor. Why would your neighbor carry insurance on your contractor if they have no liability? Exactly.

Is he telling you to earn that much or is he being funny? Just my situation, but my hubby would never tell me how much money I had to make or whether I should work part time or full time. Life is too short to work 7 days a week or 12+ hours daily for the almighty dollar!

Now it seems, I'm just scraping by, juggling the utility bills and paying whichever one has sent me the 24-hour disconnect notice this month; it's become a grim miserable job compared to what it was.  I'm nearing retirement age, but I doubt retirement is going to be in my future for a very long time.

The single worst thing that ever happened to us was going from the gross line count to the character count, and not adjusting the line rate upward to parity -- not to mention the adjustments that should have been made to accommodate all the extra time spent struggling to make sense of huge increase in ESL dictations that has occurred over the last 15 years, and of course there should have been COLAs as well, which we all know has not happened.

In the 1980s, with the advent of powerful and affordable PCs, free lance transcription became much more common.  So if you were experienced, disciplined and organized, you could be much better off economically by working for yourself -- although there were definitely advantages to working in-hospital.  There were great benefits and the salary was indeed enough to support a small family (albeit very modestly.) 

For a number of years during that time, many of us worked part time in the hospital for benefits, but made our real money at home.

But in my case, the time came when it just made no economic sense to work in-housel, I was better buying off buying private insurance for major medical care, tax-deferred annuities, and self-insuring the little stuff. 

I would just pick up tapes from the hospital every morning, and drop off the work (which I printed out) from the day before.

I usually had 24 hours to transcribe tapes which I did during school hours, when things were peaceful and quiet. 

I transcribed a couple thousand GROSS lines day.  Every single character line counted, so by taking advantage of headers/footers, creative macros, word expansions, etc., I really boosted my productivity far beyond to what I could do in-house on the self-correcting Selectric, Wang or Mag Card, or whatever 10-years behind technology was currently being used, plus all the office distractions and politics, and I definitely did not to have to work 24/7 to earn a good living. (Oh how I loved WP5.1!)

In fact, 2000 gross lines a day, 5 days a week at 10 cents a line (courier 10-pitch font, one-inch margins) was very very do-able for an experienced productive acute-care MT, provided she had good equipment, good reference books, and stayed focused.  It would take about 5-6 hours a day to get that amount of work done.  So figure the math out for yourselves, that's just a tad under $50,000 a year, certainly not a high standard of living in those days but adequate when it meant you could stay home and be actually be a full time parent when your children were home from school, and very comfortable, if you were married with a working spouse, or had rerliable child support, or social security for your children (if you were widowed.)

If you chose to work some weekends and evenings, it was not that all that difficult to hit that $75,000 a year mark, which I did for a couple of years so I was able to pay the tuition at a good boarding school -- and cruelly thwarted my teen-aged son's only ambition in life, which was to become a high school drop-out.

Things have gotten bad, no doubt about that, and the worst part of it is, is that most of the big MTSOs are still charging the hospitals as much as we used to earn, and sometimes even more, but the MT is no longer earning it, and often can't get enough work to meet the line counts required by the MTSOs for benefits (although the cost of those benefits are reflected in the cost charged to the hospital.) 

I don't know what the answer is, as the electronic immigrant is such a huge threat.

It's pretty darn awful, and I feel very very bad for those of you starting out in this field, and I do hope things change for you (and that someday soon I can retire.)

And the point that the person made is that that she was worth $75,000 a year, not necessarily that she was getting it or could get it, and I absolutely agree with her.  This is a hard tough job if it's done right -- it's mentally tiring, it's hard on your back, your hands, your neck (and your behind.)

It requires a lot of time -- it requires focus, you must stay alert, and must give 100% of your attention to what you are doing 100% of the time, it takes education and brains -- and now a word of truth which my 35+ years experience gives me the right to say aloud -- it's not fulfilling, wonderful, lovable and enjoyable, it's often as repetitious and tedious as an assembly line but infinitely more frustrating.

PS: I recall one of my colleagues from those early years of my career, now gone from this earth, telling me that the 1960s were really the "fat" years, that things actually began to decline salary-wise, in real dollars, in the 1970s. 

are making this kind of money? I've been in this profession for over 20 years and the MOST that I ever made in a given year was $50K working for a service and that was with loads of off-the-clock overtime.  Where I work now the majority of decent work is being offshored and the American side MT's are left with terrible work to wade through.  A 'good' check for me now would come out to the equivalent of about $10 an hour!

I can see how folks who have their own accounts could make the type of income range above, but working for a service?  What is it that the rest of you now that obviously I'm totally missing???

and with a really good incentive plan.  I live in the Kansas City area.  $10 seems like a low starting point even with only two years experience which is the usual benchmark for hospital MT jobs. 

It's been my experience that the low end of the pay scale for hospital employed MTs was around $12 an hour.  Also, it's been my experience that the pay offered is usually based on years of experience and how well you perform on the transcription test.

I would say if their pay is that low, they should at least be making it up with incentive and it doesn't sound like they are.

JMO

are you covered by your medical/dental insurance?  My employee handbook does not mention this.  Is there a "standard" period of time that you remain covered?  TIA for your reply. 

nm