421–430 of 531 posts
This 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.
This 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.
As an aside, I went to UNC Chapel Hill 1992-1996 and it cost $2k/year tuition. Now it's $20k. We've had a shift in attitude in this country of "why am I paying for something that benefits someone else," but it's going to bite us in the ass down the road as intelligent / hard working people say "why should I accumulate debt to work that hard? I'll just choose something else."
General Surgery and OB/Gyn have gone from being the hardest residencies to get, to now only requiring you graduate from medical school. The hours and the pay are the reason. Orthopedic surgeons get $1000 to put a scope in a knee and scrape a little whereas general surgeons get $400 to take out an appendix in the middle of the night. Ortho is hardest residency to get.
I was top 25% of my class and if I tried to become a surgeon 10 years earlier, I wouldn't have. Most older surgeons were top 1% of their class. My senior partner was, and man is he super smart. Anyway, I still love my job, but the hours suck (80/week). Society benefits from my service (returning sick people to the workforce) and taxes I pay ($200k / year). Not too bad return on investment, imo.
I'll probably be downvoted on a forum like this, but I worry about the most successful universities using their funds to subsidize those who would be fine without it. I was actually made aware of this by a wealthy Stanford alumni which has a fairly broad program for undergraduate tuition assistance. Graduates of mid/low tier universities seem more and more likely to have to compete with better credentialed people wit…
That said, insane cost growth is obviously the overwhelming issue in education over everything else. Almost any system that reins that in is going to be superior to one that doesn’t—-even if it is otherwise less fair.
What a surreal discussion about something obvious: University and college should be free for everyone. First, this is a great equalizer in the positive way: it does not depend on how wealthy your parents are, so you get an equal opportunity. Second: the society as a whole benefits from well educated people. Accounts need well trained doctors, doctors need well trained accountants, both need an engineer to craft them…
"Free" means someone else should be paying for it. Now, as an average income guy I will never earn as much as a Doctor and will vehemently oppose any move to pay for these would be rich people's education. If the degree is worth something, please pay it yourself. >Countries like Germany show All these kids are more than welcome to go to Germany and save $500K in tuition fees.
Once higher education is a public service and not a personal investment, there is much lower returns expected.
What a surreal discussion about something obvious: University and college should be free for everyone. First, this is a great equalizer in the positive way: it does not depend on how wealthy your parents are, so you get an equal opportunity. Second: the society as a whole benefits from well educated people. Accounts need well trained doctors, doctors need well trained accountants, both need an engineer to craft them…
Always replace "free" with "I'm paying for you". I don't know what's "obvious" about me paying your tuition fees. For once, I may be happy to fund your auto-mechanic studies as I know I'll need you to fix my car. But if you're studying ancient Akkadian I'm less inclined to pay your bills.
Would you be better off if all publicly funded roads where instead private and required you to pay tolls per usage? You would defiantly get an bill more matching your usage, and people who don’t drive would pay less. But it at least feels like we are better off with public roads because they all add value to society as a whole.
The same goes for education. You don’t care about Akkadian studies, but perhaps someone does who thanks to his education can focus on that and earn enough money to buy a car from you auto mechanic keeping him in business making life better for you.
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> It's already a house of cards and we should just deal with it instead of tying large portions of the population to these bad deals I guess the taxpayer is kind of screwed when it comes to Federal loans. I still think it is a bad idea to retroactively change laws even if the idea seems popular. As far as I understand, an individual's loan obligations don't automatically transfer to their surviving family members so…
Ah I thought you were treating private and federal loans as the same. I'm with you on private loans being treated as regular loans, let them go away in bankruptcy. For federal loans, the position the US is in with them needs to be unwound. It's not even a choice at this point, it's worse than how inflated the housing crisis happened and if we don't deal with it on our own, it's going to just show up as a surprise. Th…
I said that because I assumed the government can afford to suspend payments if your income goes below a certain level. I doubt an ordinary person has the ability to work and hide every bit of income. The good people at IRS work hard and those (bastards over at) state departments of revenue work even harder.
In practice, you're right. The taxpayer has to eat the cost. And I am sure how things will eventually happen when things eventually need to happen. Politicians hate saying no to their voters. The Republican nominee for POTUS in 2012 was at a debate or a town hall before the election and I remember him going on a rant about simplifying the tax code to a round of applause. One woman got up and asked what about credits and deductions with contributions toward their child's college fund and the nominee didn't have the strength to say he wants them to go away. Guess what if we want to simplify the tax code, we have to get rid of credits and deductions. If you can't say that to people who just applauded to you saying simplify the tax code, it will never happen. No politician wants to do that because that will destroy their career.
This is just what I think. I have no realistic way of influencing public policy. (:
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> For example: let students discharge student loans via bankruptcy. Ataturk's reply to this is dead below but I must agree with the (spirit of the) comment. While I support letting students discharge loans via bankruptcy, I VEHEMENTLY oppose making this applicable to loans already signed. This is absolutely ridiculous and anyone who supports this kind of position should be barred from public office on grounds of insa…
Wait, you are suggesting that medicaid, food stamps and low-income housing assistance should be offered to everybody? I don't think I have heard this suggested before. I'll have to ponder this.
Yes. None of these programs should exist if we can't offer them to 100% of the population. Both Democrats and Republicans use these programs as a vote bank and it polarizes our public discourse.
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As I understand it, salaries are only one of the many ways that doctors make money. Many "providers" are doctor-owned. Perhaps a more general statement would be that decreasing the cost of medical care will unavoidably decrease the income and/or wealth of doctors. I don't see a problem with this, so long as doctors can earn a decent living. An idea I've thought about is that medical school is free, but doctors primar…
> I don't see a problem with this, so long as doctors can earn a decent living. There's an enormous opportunity to disrupt doctors. Doctors, particularly in the US, are grossly overpaid for the value they deliver. As I said below, there's an extra $100-$250 billion a year that gets sucked up by doctors. Frankly, the vast majority of what doctors end up doing -- collecting information, analyzing it, prescribing a cour…
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. 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…
Do you think that when Mylan raises the price of EpiPens from $50 to $500 that it's a market-based decision, for example? No; that's just an exercise of monopoly power.