imanfnp

Urgent care but that is not great pay and 4 patients and hour will be stressful especially as a new grad. Agree that CVS is not ideal for a new grad. Too limited and you need to focus on building clinic knowledge, not cleaning, cashiering, and being an MA.

Thanks to everyone for all of the thoughtful responses. Can anyone explain how the "keep your insurance" into retirement thing works? From what I gather you have to first "retire" meaning work at least 5 years. Does anyone know if I were to work there for five years, then take a deferred retirement because I will be too young to officially retire and receive payments...can I still keep the insurance even before I reach the minimum retirement age? Or does the option to buy into that insurance only restart when I reach the minimum age to receive the retirement benefits (age 62)? Or is that not an option at all?

Hmmm, that is quite a lot of leave, and I am being told to negotiate to start with max amount of PTO if they won't budge on salary. With that much PTO I could actually work per diem quite often at my original job and make pretty good $$$ that way...so much to consider.

Hmm, good to know. Thanks, I have very little experience with anything military so thank you.

Thanks for the input. Interesting that you both found the health insurance not much cheaper, I'm trying to get them to tell which plans I would be offered as the government website they sent me to has multiple plans listed with wildly varying rates and I don't know which ones are options for me. So per the federal employee website I would have both FERS which is like a mini-pension but only reaches a significant amount if you are there at least 10 years, and the thrift plan which is like a 401K but I have no clue how much the match is. But good to hear from you that it is generous. I am 39 years old and at this point I WOULD consider staying "forever" I do like primary care. So I could potentially work for 25-30 years and get a significant amount through the FERS plan. And I too have a high tolerance for BS as long as it is not unethical or leading to poor patient care or dangerous working conditions. Also this is NOT a VA job it's at a military hospital mostly caring for active duty, families, and a very few retirees, so pretty low acuity healthy population. I don't know if this setting would have less of the well known "politics" and BS that goes on at the VA. Overall, I got a very good vibe when I interviewed, nice new facilities, staff appeared happy, didn't seem to be to busy or hectic.

I have been in negotiation with a military facility for a full-time GS position as a civilian. The salary range was listed as about 80-150K. I have 10 years of primary care experience and they initially offered me about 100K. At the time my pay from a private internal medicine clinic was around 120K but the benefits were sucky, especially health insurance for the family was super expensive (like 1K per month!). I sent them proof of my income (required for federal job negotiation) and I honestly thought they were no longer interested in me because I didn't hear back from them for a long time. Surprise! Months later they counter offered with 110K (a 3 step increase). In the meantime I have already started another position with another company with a base salary of 130K with better benefits (but not as good as federal). But this position is in a specialty (endocrine/diabetes clinical trials) so limited in scope and I don't see myself doing it forever (who knows if this research company will be around that long any way). But the schedule good and its low stress compared to my previous job. I am going to go for round 2 of negotiations for the government job with my current salary information as I am interested in the stability of a government job, low cost medical insurance, retirement plan, and scope of practice (I'd have my own panel of primary care patients, which is what I prefer). My question is...how much are these government benefits and retirement plan really worth? They were trying to tell me that you should consider about a 20 percent lower salary due to the great benefits and retirement. Is this true? Any insight? I'm working on trying to calculate it out. Anyone able to negotiate to start closer to the top of the GS pay scale? I don't think I can stomach a 20K pay cut... but I'm trying to think long term here. I'm in a relatively high COL area on the east coast. Thanks for any input!