I'm not sure why so many of you are getting all up in arms about this.
Right now we have a system where most medical students have to pay most of the costs for their own medical school (generally via extensive loans which the government helps support), but then the government (via Medicare) pays for most of the costs of their residency, and then the government or a well-funded charitable organization pays for most of the costs of their fellowship.
There are several (probably unintended) consequences of this system. Even though loans for medical school are fairly available for students with decent credit, and even though there are loan forgiveness plans for serving in certain areas, the large price tag of medical school doubtless scares of many students from modest backgrounds. There is an extensive body of research analyzing programs to encourage poorer students to go to college, and it pretty unambiguously shows that the availability of scholarships and/or loan forgiveness is much less effective at getting poorer students to go to college than programs that guarantee free or reduced tuition for students who meet simple, clear criteria. Poor students are typically very risk averse, and will avoid a situation that leaves them with even a slight change of getting stuck with a huge tuition bill or loan.
With medical school being the main cost bottleneck, once a student finishes medical school the incentives are for them to continue on and specialize as much as possible. They've already accumulated most of their debt, which they will have to pay back whether they become a general practitioner or a pediatric onco-cardiodermanesthetist. Both the GP and the superspecialized doctor will have roughly the same amount of debt, but the superspecialized doctor will likely earn a salary many times higher. The financial incentives clearly push any student that has an opportunity to specialize to do so.
Take a step back for a moment, and consider how we would design the system if we had a clean slate. There's a large sum of government money to spend on the training of doctors, as well as a large government organization to get loans to students who are pursuing their medical studies. There are three main stages of medical training. The first stage is medical school, which lasts 4 years, which everyone needs to complete, and which is the same regardless of one's ultimate specialization. The second stage is residency (for simplicity's sake, I'm including internship in here), which typically lasts for 3-7 years. Every doctor needs to complete one, although the residency for each specialization is different. Some residencies clearly put their residents on a track to very highly paid fields, and some on a track that includes much needed, poorly paid primary care. Then there's fellowship, which only a small fraction of doctors will do, and which lasts from 1-3 years. Most fellowships increase one's earning power substantially. For all three of these stages, the institution doing the training needs to somehow get money to cover the costs of training (which we'll call tuition), and the students who are being trained will need to somehow get money to cover their living costs.
What the authors of this editorial are proposing is to use the government medical-training money to pay tuition for students in medical school and residency. Medical students would remain on the hook for their own living expenses. Residents in the poorly paid and understaffed primary care fields would receive a stipend to cover living expenses as well as tuition, while residents in other specialties would be on the hook for their own living expenses. It's not as clear to me what they are proposing for fellowships (many of which are funded by private organizations anyway), but is seems they want to have the government pay for tuition but not living costs there as well. They don't directly address this, but one would assume that government sponsored loan programs would evolve to offer loans for living expenses to students in all three stages of training.
Ignoring for a moment that some students may be able to pay for living costs with savings or support from family, this means that students would accumulate an amount of debt roughly proportional to their earning potential. This would reduce the absurdity of having a system where a family practice doctor and a neurosurgeon carry roughly the same debt load, despite wildly different salaries. It would reduce the financial incentives that encourage doctors to specialize as much as they possibly can, and encourage doctors to go into much-needed primary care fields. It would make medical school much more appealing to poor and debt-averse students.
And it would reduce the silliness of the government handing hundreds of thousands of dollars in free training _and_ hundreds of thousands of dollar in stipends to surgery residents who are about to enter into one of the most highly payed professions known to man. Instead, the government would only give hundreds of thousands of dollars of free training to them.
This isn't a fully fleshed out plan, and it's not perfect, but I think this is a totally reasonable proposal.