re: Capping graduate loans to 150k

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SmackoverHawg

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Sounds like the medical field is not for you.

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Also can we say giving 300k plus in private loans is just a worse solution?

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No...we can't.

I, as a taxpayer, am not on the hook if you fail to pay a private loan back.

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How much in federal loans did your MD wife take?
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0 she was rich and her dad paid for it.

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"Was"?

Then perhaps you could pursue being "unburdened by the past," as Kamala suggested?

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I understand there is a lot of risk involved for lenders without money printers.

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Indeed. But do you also understand there is a lot of risk involved for lenders with money printers? It's simply transferred to taxpayers.

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Sounds like the medical field is not for you.

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I'm doing fine. More than fine. I knew we'd probably seen our last raise when Obamacare passed. I'm just stating how unattractive it is to younger students. I was speaking of the "living wage" another poster had stated. Living costs are more when your never home and having to eat away from the house. You're also making life and social sacrifices that you can't put a number on. What I've seen over the last 20 years is a drastic decline in the overall quality of physicians at every level. As education has gotten more and more expensive, the quality of the training has fallen off. Even if you graduate more students, it doesn't help. They aren't used to working the hours, they are less knowledgeable on the whole, and half or more are now female. Females generally don't work full time and those that do don't see/produce what male counterparts do. What's happened in medicine is a functional shortage of doctors. There is no shortage of physicians, there is a shortage of physicians will to work full time or more for various reasons. The lower pay doesn't help. Not to mention very few physicians work for themselves anymore. They all end up employed to get loan payback and essentially get locked into a career of indebted service. the performance bonuses never flesh out so they do what most human do and work just enough to keep their jobs.

Sounds like the medical field isn't for me? I'm just saying what others are thinking. Another problem is that most doctors want to display a facade of wealth and success that simply doesn't exist. They are pissed off, burned out and cynical by age 40 if not sooner when they realize they are trapped into what appears to be a dead end field while they see former classmates with no college degree out earning them at the local refinery.

I'm not saying they can't succeed, but it's much, much harder than it was pre-Obama care and the reward is much smaller and further away. The most demoralizing thing is seeing how much more work has been placed on our backs by insurers over the last 20 years. Then you have hospital admins making more than any doctor in their system, running the facility in the ground because they know jack shite about medicine while they freeze wages or cut them.

I'd say the field is for me. I understand it and continue to thrive but I'm not going to sit back and say "all is good" when it clearly isn't. I'm set for life. I stand to benefit from the collapse of other clinics, but I hate what is happening to our health system overall. I see the end game and it isn't pretty. This train is going off the cliff and i'm about to jump clear. It's especially bad in red states as medicare re-imbursement is much lower than our blue state counterparts, especially in deep blue, highly populated voting centers. CMS has maps you can search by zip code. I encourage people to do their research and see how our taxes are funding healthcare in other states and cities.

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If enough people were paying them back, this wouldn’t be necessary.

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True. All they need is a Biden to come along and decide to wipe the debts clean, and just ignore Supreme Court rulings.

Or better, cap it at whatever rate the lender and the borrower would like to take without the possibility of a bail out.

It should be a loan to be paid back like any other.

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Are these programs like being a VA doc for a minimum number of years and they forgive the loan?

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Yeah. But some can be longer for bigger loans. A lot of fault falls on some of the providers for living like kings as students. I lived like a peasant for 3 years. My wife was in pharmacy school and a year older than me, but we still scrimped and saved that year. We came out owing tuition only. Paid hers off first as mine was deferred at the time until I was 6 months into practice after finishing residency, with no accrued interest at that time. I negotiated a salary guaranteed with the local hospital. They guaranteed me $12k month income/ $12k for overhead and loan payback. They would subtract my collections and pay the difference up to those amounts. By the end of month 3, I was collecting enough to cover it all and then some. By not taking a more lucrative 3 year employment package, I bet on myself and won. Since they had to pay so little and my loan amount was only $34k, corporate decided it wasn't worth the paper work and legal fees each year for five years and called it even at the end of the first year. Plus, they knew I was staying in the area. So, I went to med school for free not even counting scholarships I won for being top of my class in GPA for 2 of the 3 years we are graded and awards in specific subjects. I had also banked excess scholarship money from college for room and board/books. I was allowed to live off campus due to a housing shortage. I shared a 3 bedroom trailer with 2 friends. $100/month rent and utilities. I got $2500 cash/semester for room/board. So, I spent as little as possible and banked that, while working when I could. Science degrees make it tougher to work due to unusual lab times and earlier morning starts for some of the classes.

So there are ways to get some or all of it paid back that don't lock you in, but you have to be a go getter and not take the bigger up front carrot.

Maybe we only grant loans at all for jobs that are in demand/short supply ?? Spend the money for kids to get their MD rather than women’s studies? Zero loans for bullshite degrees. Or what if loans were treated like investments by doing a basic rate of return calculation on average salary 5-10 years out. If it’s less than the loan amount, application denied.