But who is going to pay off that $450 million ?
NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students
21–30 of 531 posts
Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students
#22This is amazing. I graduated from medical school two years ago with $300,000 in debt. I'm a software developer on the side and would love to stop residency to try a healthcare startup and/or pursue a research, but the risk is too great - I need the attending salary to pay off the debt.
If I may ask, how exactly do you have the time to be both a resident and a software developer? There aren't enough hours in the day. Do you even sleep?
There is time for life outside of residency. My wife started residency with a 5 month old and had another child half way through, this delayed her graduation a total of 4 weeks.
Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students
#23This is awesome! So many medical students are kinda forced into more profitable healthcare practices than ones which people need more desperately (e.g. plastic surgery vs rheumatology). I especially love that this was done with private fundraising over government funding. Philanthropy can be effective, often far more so than governments!
Plus anything that can be done to juice the supply side of the healthcare curve is a big benefit. Cheaper school means more doctors means lower labor costs means cheaper healthcare.
Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students
#24This is amazing. I graduated from medical school two years ago with $300,000 in debt. I'm a software developer on the side and would love to stop residency to try a healthcare startup and/or pursue a research, but the risk is too great - I need the attending salary to pay off the debt.
If I may ask, how exactly do you have the time to be both a resident and a software developer? There aren't enough hours in the day. Do you even sleep?
Heh, I'll chime in as I did residency at a busy program and advanced my coding skills on the side. Even working 80hr+ weeks you find downtime. Some of that you use for sleeping and studying. With whatever's left, some of my co-residents liked to read. Others had sort of social lives outside the hospital. For me, I coded with most of my freetime. It helped scratch an itch-- problems are solved with 100% certainty, errors can be found with testing preventing many mistakes before they actually affect people, you can build something with your creative juices and get a level of independence not possible in medicine... The list goes on. But my point is, residency is demanding, but you still have a little downtime here and there.
Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students
#25I hope this helps to decrease the costs of medical care in the US to some extent as it removes one pressure for doctors to earn extra money charging for things that might not need to be needed. edit: Just so I am clear I know that there are lots of other influences on healthcare costs and doctor debt isn't the only pressure they face. Doctors do have some influence on cost (if not large) and if pressure on them is re…
why would doctors willingly give up making extra hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope this helps to decrease the costs of medical care in the US to some extent as it removes one pressure for doctors to earn extra money charging for things that might not need to be needed. Physician earnings account for about 7% of total spending on healthcare. Of that 7%, the fraction due to student debt specifically is significant from the physician's perspective, but negligible from a systemic picture. This…
I'm really interested in this info, can you tell me where you got the 7% from? Are there good in depth breakdowns of this?
It's a fairly easy statistic to find; here's the first hit on Google: https://www.medicalbag.com/finance/examining-physician-salar...
One caveat is that oftentimes you'll see higher numbers (in the range of 15-20%) cited, but that's usually because they're not distinguishing between doctors (MDs) and other clinical staff (nurses, physicians' assistants, etc.). In the aggregate, the latter account for about half, or in other words, roughly equal to what doctors in total pull in. As that article notes, this also doesn't mean that all of that money goes to the physicians themselves. Some portion is taken by the practices and groups that employ them, and a huge chunk of physicians' take-home pay is allocated towards business expenses[0].
For the context of the original article, only MDs are relevant, not what NPs, RNs, and so forth make.
[0] Unlike software developers, who generally have their business expenses covered by their employer, physicians are typically expected to cover all of theirs out-of-pocket, which means that the seemingly-high salaries that you often see listed aren't directly comparable to salaries in many other fields, where the out-of-pocket expense are much lower.
Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students
#27But who is going to pay off that $450 million ?
law students
Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students
#28This is amazing. I graduated from medical school two years ago with $300,000 in debt. I'm a software developer on the side and would love to stop residency to try a healthcare startup and/or pursue a research, but the risk is too great - I need the attending salary to pay off the debt.
Fellow MD student here. I feel your pain. I've planning to just do PGY-1, work as a GP at urgent care night/weekends and do software dev full time.
You're going to work as a "GP" with at most one third of the training of almost every other doctor in practice? Seems like you're shorting your future patients a bit. My advice as someone who sees a lot of patients who were incompetently managed at urgent care is to avoid going this route. You're setting yourself and your patients up to fail with potentially devastating consequences.
Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students
#29This is amazing. I graduated from medical school two years ago with $300,000 in debt. I'm a software developer on the side and would love to stop residency to try a healthcare startup and/or pursue a research, but the risk is too great - I need the attending salary to pay off the debt.
Fellow MD student here. I feel your pain. I've planning to just do PGY-1, work as a GP at urgent care night/weekends and do software dev full time.
PGY1 gets you a license, but most private insurers will not reimburse for non-board certified providers.
Re: NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students
#30This is awesome! So many medical students are kinda forced into more profitable healthcare practices than ones which people need more desperately (e.g. plastic surgery vs rheumatology). I especially love that this was done with private fundraising over government funding. Philanthropy can be effective, often far more so than governments!
Plus anything that can be done to juice the supply side of the healthcare curve is a big benefit. Cheaper school means more doctors means lower labor costs means cheaper healthcare.
Cheaper medical school tuition isn't going to lead to more doctors. The limiting factor is the number of available seats and residency positions, not the cost.