Make Medical School Three Years

3 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by mitchbob
(nytimes.com)

4 Comments

techblueberry

6 hours ago

I think too often, we conflate the words of a policy with it's values. Like

"The impact of President Trump’s law is clear: affluent students will manage, while lower-income students will think twice about going to medical school, if not forego it altogether. Fewer students will hail from rural areas, and therefore fewer will return to such communities to care for patients. By selecting for those who can afford to pay, the loan cap may appear to reduce average medical debt. But the physician shortage will worsen and health care access will grow even more unequal."

Poor students shouldn't be taking out $300k worth of student loans.

"With the government abrogating its role in supporting medical students"

Supporting poor medical students taking on 300k of debt is not supporting medical students. This is something of the subject of this article, but we need innovation in this space, or more rural/poor grants for medical students. Student loans as a solution to all education problems is more and more showing to be bananas.

SR2Z

4 hours ago

On the contrary - a doctor over their lifetime is an immensely valuable asset to society. They prevent people from dying or being permanently injured - getting an extra year of functionality out of someone's body easily results in tens of thousands of dollars of GDP, if not more.

It's not an art degree that it's just debt with no expectation of usefulness. The government should be offering medical training for free if it can afford it.

techblueberry

3 hours ago

> The government should be offering medical training for free if it can afford it.

Yeah, I don't think we're disagreeing here, for free, sure, $300k debt? No