One downside of making lots of money as a doc is all those strictly – really! strictly! – non-profit organizations demanding you take more and more absolutely positively necessary certification exams which strangely enough cost you a fortune and if you don’t pay up we’ll put a thingie on your record that says you aren’t certified which is like ooh scary gonna hurt your career…
All Strictly Non-Profit, let us reiterate! Ignore the “multimillion dollar apartments which offer owners chauffeur driven late model BMWs” the American Board of Internal Medicine has gifted to itself out of your fees!
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Yes, the ever-chiseling ABIM is an organization always able to come up with another crisis in patient care that cries out for another expensive set of certifying exams.
The ABIM has gotten so disgusting, however, that this dude has formed a breakaway certifying organization that charges hugely less and is drawing so many grossed-out docs away from the BMW organization that the BMW organization is now going Uh haha just kidding we’re going to… uh… pull back on some of these tests and … uh… maybe look at what we’re charging… and I mean hold on cuz we’re on it we promise…
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Sadly, the doc-chiseling starts well before ABIM has a chance to start threatening you with anemic certification. There’s the notorious Step 2 Clinical Skills exam, about which more and more med students are making a fuss.
Hundreds of medical students at the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University are joining a nationwide campaign to eliminate a standardized licensing test they say is redundant and a financial burden.
Students say that the test – the Step 2 Clinical Skills exam, which measures bedside manner and real-world problem-solving while students interact with people acting as patients – should be replaced with an alternative exam that the nation’s medical schools could administer free.
The Step 2 exam is expensive: There is a $1,275 registration fee, and because the test is offered in just five cities, students often have to bear the cost of travel and lodging.
… “There have to be better and more efficient ways to test students,” said James S. Gessner, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society. “There is absolutely no reason to bring students to five testing centers at a huge cost when the material can be administered on-site at schools.”
Yeah, but if they did that, the organization behind the test would be out $36 million a year.