[quote=“Wesley_Clark, post:12, topic:547576”]
[quote=“Sunspace, post:9, topic:547576”]
Don’t hold your breath on that. In 1999, my daughter-in-law graduated from Tufts Medical School. One of the graduation speakers was Marcia Angell, then editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. She detailed all the problems in the US “system” and then said that the good news was that it was now so fucked up (not her words, but a reasonable interpretation of what she said) that it was about to collapse under its own weight and be replaced by a real system. That was 11 years ago.
It is not mentioned much but one of the drivers of US health care costs is the exorbitant cost of medical school. Had she not gotten a public health fellowship for her last two years, she would have ended up a quarter million dollars in debt. Even so, congress was so niggardly about these “fellowships” that, unlike all other scholarships and fellowships they were fully taxed as income. The reasoning seemed to be that they would immediately become wealthy and shouldn’t get a tax break on top of it. One result is that nearly all new MDs feel they have to make a lot of money fast to pay off their loans. MY DIL has always practiced at a hospital on a salary and figures her loans–still well over $100,000–are like a mortgage that she will spend much of her life paying off. She is in family medicine, incidentally. Very few doctors are willing to settle for the lower income
In Canada, medical education, like all education, is heavily subsidized and doctors do not have to spend their early years paying off gigantic loans.