First, Hillary Clinton wouldn't make medical school tuition-free. There's already a surplus of medical students, and unlike a college degree, a medical degree is not necessary to be competitive in the modern workforce unless you want to be a doctor.
As LizzyM stated, taxes would increase dramatically. Tuition would only be free at state medical schools, so there'd be fierce competition at schools that used to be people's best option. Meanwhile, applications would decrease at private schools. They'd be forced to cut services and tuition to woo applicants. Also, I don't expect lower salaries for quite some time. I don't think anyone would choose not to fight a pay cut!
Would the increase be dramatic? It's worth taking a deeper look even though I agree Clinton would not make medical school tuition free. Given our current healthcare model there is no incentive or real reason to do so and given her politics it is even less likely since she doesnt support the changes that would get our system to the place where it would make sense for medical school to be free.
There are 87,000 medical students in the US. The average cost to attend one year of medical school is about 45,000 a year. Thats about 15.7 billion dollars to fund four years of medical school expenses for every medical student in the country attending a private or public school. Or, 3.9 billion dollars a year. Such a program would have to fund both private and public medical school students to an equal extent, though students at private school would either have to take loans above a fixed amount or pay out of pocket for the difference if private schools themselves dont cut costs to meet a normalized tuition line.
Ok so we have a public cost of 3.9 billion dollars a year. Seems like a lot, but not really.
Ok, let's assume the likeliest case where US military spending isn't cut. In fact, it'll likely rise in the same way it does almost every year. So the federal govt. needs to find 3.9 billion dollars and we aren't going to cut any existing programs so let's tax the people. There are a million and one ways to do this (you can tax businessess, maybe even health insurers, instead of individuals to give one example.) but let's pick the simplest tax to raise: federal income tax. There are 122 million american taxpayers. Let's follow the simple assumption that every single one of them would pay for this equally (which is, of course, not representative of reality). This means that each american taxpayer would pay about 32 more dollars in federal income tax every year to fund this "Med-School for everyone!" program. A more realistic scenario is that the bottom bracket taxpayers pay something like 16 more $ / year for the program and the top brackets pay like 64$ / yr just to give some estimates.
This is not a
dramatic increase in taxes. It's hardly an increase at all. It's a pittance. It also doesn't count the reduction in administrative costs from eliminating federal loans for medical school altogether on the med school and government lender side.
That being said, there are other ways to fund this kind of initiative. None of which, however, make sense when our system isn't really geared to meeting the healthcare needs of the whole public. This kind of thing would have to come after serious healthcare reform.
One fantastic way to pay for everything would be to pass legislation to let the U.S. government, the largest purchaser in the healthcare market, to actually bargain for drug prices lowering costs and freeing up money to, say, build a *truly* public healthcare option in the US.
edit: removed the bit about F-35's, the planes actually cost about 100 million / plane 8.5 billion worth were purchased by the US government in FY-2015. So to ammend my previous statement, one way to fund these costs would be to not purchase F-35s for two years (~120 fewer F-35s)
edit 2: removed a math error. Previous estimate calculated the tax increase necessary to fund four years of medical school but had taxes being collected in one year. Now taxes collected in one year pay for one year of medical school for 87,000 medical students.
