<p>Somemom, that would be a great goal for students in residency. And that might be doable if the resident hours were still 80/wk at a $45-50K salary. But I have heard that those work hours have been scaled back some, which means a little more money-spending free time.</p>
<p>Bottom line is total TOTAL financial discipline. Scary numbers indeed.</p>
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<p>I agree with the OP’s culpability here but this fee is outrageous.</p>
<p>lol greyhaired!! but true. another thing i think you have explained is that the fees are not under the doctors control… health insurance companies dictate your income…this year has been a month to month question mark as the govt has not determined the final fee schedules for care…if nothing changes by november, doctors face a 21% cut in reimbursements. we have some procedures we do that now that already pay less than half of what was paid 10 years ago. blue cross on average pays less than medicare for a service.
you may buy new equipment in part working out what revenue it generates when considering the loan, and 6 months later that fee has been cut or that service is no longer re-imbursable. …
We so want to go back to the time when we could accept a baked good, or vegetables from a patient when they really couldnt afford that copay but wanted to do something and maintain their dignity. and decide for ourselves whether they could pay the bill… now you cant…once you file that claim …by not collecting in full all portions of the allowed amount and treating each person exactly the same, you can face prison time for fraud and abuse…it is seen as charging different people different amounts.</p>
<p>Servicing the interesting during residency is definitely possible.</p>
<p>Just moonlight a lot. WHen you are already working 70-80 Hr weeks and studying another 10-20 hrs a week, whats another 10 hrs on the job for thousands? This seems alot more feasible on low intensity specialties.</p>
<p>^Then be caught tired on the job and fail to save a patient or otherwise contribute to their death/maiming because you don’t sleep.</p>
<p>EEk, maybe I will reconsider suggesting to S he should consider med school.<br>
grey- not surprised about avg loan amounts though, 1/4 @$250K very scary indeed as well as people shooting at you to get your degree via the military route.</p>
<p>this is why you should always read manuals especially the “terms and uses” section, which mostly everyone, i think, skips. It also doesn’t hurt to have some basic knowledge in excel and by basic, I do not mean being able to type in the cells.</p>
<p>Please don’t discourage your child from going into medicine. It is a great and fulfilling career. Just make sure he goes in with his eyes open. Consider a state and therefore cheaper med school. Be very aware of how much debt will be involved, and do some budgets with the anticipated repayment amounts. </p>
<p>If the finances are proibitive consider working for a year or two to defray costs. It may be myth, but I seem to recall a rural town paying for a kid to go through school after his training he owed them a lot of years, but he wanted to be in the area anyway. </p>
<p>Do be careful of the non US schools. They are really expensive, and the students have less options when trainging. </p>
<p>Finally, and this is the hardest, do not co-sign his loans. This is not mean - rather this is practicle. Again these loans are not bankruptable. Too many well meaning students are the cause for their parents to lose their home and everything they have when Medicine does not work out. What if you owe hundreds of thousands, get sick, or for what ever reason can’t finish? Have a plan.</p>
<p>Sure she didn’t read the fine print, but did she really have a choice? For most people, like myself, the difference between taking out $200,000 worth of loans is College or No College. In reality it doesn’t matter what the fine print says because you have to pay for college somehow, it’s not like Meg Whitman is going to swoop in and pay your education.</p>
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<p>She had a choice not to miss payments. That is the real kicker, the lending agencies make most of their profits from the penalties.</p>
<p>There is also a program with the Indian Health Service. The government pays for med school and then the new doctor works on an Indian reservation for as many years as he got the money, i. e. two years of paid med school = two years of service. And the government still pays you enough to live on while you’re on the reservation. </p>
<p>But overall, depending on what happens to medicine in the coming years, I am with the previous poster. If Obamacare makes medicine a low paying profession when the length of schooling and the amount of loans are taken into consideration, the newly minted medical doctor may be better off working for industry (pharmaceutical, medical device, bioengineering, etc.) than actually delivering patient care.</p>
<p>I hope she reads the fine print before prescribing any meds. Those contraindications can be severe.</p>
<p>tatin they can also consider (if choosing those paths) the md/phd programs with nih funding…they pay med school tuition and a stipend each year . then of course you have residency after so its potentially a 12 year committment</p>
<p>"Sure she didn’t read the fine print, but did she really have a choice? For most people, like myself, the difference between taking out $200,000 worth of loans is College or No College. In reality it doesn’t matter what the fine print says because you have to pay for college somehow, it’s not like Meg Whitman is going to swoop in and pay your education. "</p>
<p>My choices were $40-$50k in debt or no college-- or work and save money until I turned 24, pay my way through community college to get started if I felt like it, and then I could have applied for financial aid as an independent and THEN finish college. I think that is the responsible way to handle that situation, not just signing loans because you feel you have no other choice. That was an immature mistake I made.</p>
<p>I also don’t think “most” people are in a position to end up 200k in debt or have no college. There are PLENTY of options that are less than 50k per year. If I hadn’t gone to community college first and went to the most expensive school in my state I’d still have only ended up 100k in.</p>
<p>I think the biggest problem with Medical (and Law) school is that one needs to go through 4 years of undergraduate before one is able to apply to those two professional schools, at least in the US. In contrast, any individual interested in Engineering, may enter that field at the undergraduate level, provided said individual possesses a good level of mathematical and scientific knowledge.</p>
<p>Engineering takes approx. 4 years at the undergraduate level; after completion, a newly-minted engineer, if hired, is then placed through “real world” training before that engineer is given more significant responsibilities. For certain fields, a Professional Engineer license (P.E.) is required before an engineer is able to sign off design plans. Of course, Medical (and Law) schools already do this except these two schools tack on an extra 4 years filtering system.</p>
<p>It would not be unreasonable to admit high school graduates to Medical (and Law) schools and utilize a filtering system, similar to the one Engineering schools use, to weed out the students that are not up to it. The salaries of doctors and lawyers would not be affected that much (the salaries would probably fall near the level of engineers).</p>
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<p>My wife plans on attending med/dental school after she completes her chemistry degree. I have been trying to convince her to go into the biotech or pharmaceutical industries instead, where I think she is (ok, we) going to make more money in the long run. With the amount of people who live unhealthy lives, there will be a huge demand for medical drugs, medical devices, etc. in the coming years.</p>
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Are you talking about UG or cost of UG+Med school? One can attend UG for substantially less than $200K.</p>
<p>I wonder if the individual in the article attended any sessions like the financial seminars directed specifically at med school students. The one below is from UCLA but some other colleges have similar sessions - </p>
<p>(From UCLA)
[Debt</a> Management](<a href=“Medical Student Resources”>http://www.medstudent.ucla.edu/current/fao/default.cfm?pgID=208)</p>
<p>And something similar form UCI -
<a href=“http://www.ofas.uci.edu/content/Medical.aspx[/url]”>http://www.ofas.uci.edu/content/Medical.aspx</a></p>
<p>And this powerpoint from UCSD has some useful info including expected debt and earnings -
<a href=“Financial Aid - UC San Diego School of Medicine”>https://meded.ucsd.edu/asa/financial_aid/information/</a></p>
<p>(All of this was found by me, someone with no real skin in the game, a non-doctor, non-student, in a few minutes of browsing the internet. Hopefully someone with a more vested interest can manage to glean even more info if they’re willing to allocate a few hours to this discovery)</p>
<p>Residents do not legally have much chance to moonlight now due to the regulations which control hours they can work per week. Some residency programs, even in the old days prohibit work outside of the residency. This effectively means little or no moonlighting for most residents. One also needs to understand that most plastic surgeons do mostly medical work with some cosmetics. It takes years of hard work to establish a practice with a cosmetic emphasis. Figure 10 to 20 years. To pay back $250,000 of debt requires collecting (not billing) somewhere around $1,000,000 to service (if you are lucky) a 50% overhead, a 36% federal tax, ? % state tax (11% in California) , 2.9% medicare tax, 12.4% social security tax and any local taxes.</p>
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<p>The graduation rates for college students is hovering at around 60%. Most high school students aren’t ready for college, let alone med (or law)school and hundreds of thousands of loans. </p>
<p>So undergraduate college filters out those cut out for intensive grad schools. High school does not.</p>