The outrageous cost of working in

medicine
Source: The Washington Post By Louis W. Sullivan June 9 at 11:22 am


Over the past two decades, medical school tuition has increased by 312 percent in public
institutions and 165 percent in private institutions. This has left students in the health
professions with enormous amounts of student debt and, perhaps even worse, has turned
many others away from pursuing such fields all together.
This is not consistent with our nations goals of increasing student degree attainment and
filling much needed roles in the health professions. Projections show that we will need
124,000 more physicians, 157,000 more pharmacists and up to 1 million more nurses in
the United States over the next 10 to 20 years, in part due to expanded coverage under the
Affordable Care Act. Yet today, low-income students are discouraged from applying to
medical, dental and other health programs because of high tuition and insufficient
scholarship funds.
Our elected and appointed policy makers in government, academia and business need to
start paying attention. Our nations health will increasingly suffer from this growing lack of
health providers and most certainly from a lack of health providers in communities of
need.
You shouldn't have to come from a wealthy family (or be willing to tolerate a lifetime
burden of debt or the deferral of buying a home and starting a family) to go into health
care.
And yet 60 percent of medical students, for example, hail from families with incomes in
the top 20 percent of the nation. Meanwhile only 3 percent come from families with
incomes in the lowest 20 percent. The prospect of having to borrow and incur debts of
$150,000 to $250,000 to enter the profession causes many students to seek careers
elsewhere.
Even those students who do successfully navigate the rocky financial terrain of health
professions programs graduate with intense financial pressure, which then distorts their
professional career choices. It often leads them to choose high-paying, procedurally
intense specialties such as anesthesia, dermatology and orthopedic surgery rather than a
primary-care field such as family medicine, pediatrics or internal medicine.
The result of this dysfunctional system deprives our country of the health professionals
needed, particularly in rural and inner-city areas, and in racial and ethnic minority
communities. It also deprives us of diversity within the profession itself. According to an
article in the New England Journal of Medicine, the cost of attending medical school is the
No. 1 reason why minorities do not apply to medical school.