UGA brings up an interesting point. Most people finish med school and have to pay off the equivalent of two mortgages, one for a home, one for the school debt.
It does take a lot of money to make it happen. But that is largley because of the fact that med schools are so damned expensive. Essentially, many are run as a business. So they need their cut of profit.
SO we need our cut as well. The reason we have such expensive medicine in this country is because we have so many intermediaries and all need their cut of profit.Back to the example of the costs of being a doctor.
From a public high school you need to spend the money preping for the SAT or ACT, then the cost of the exam itself, over $100. Then the cost of undergrad, another $40,000 tuition at a public university, plus cost of books, supplies and cost of living. Then MCAT prep materials or course, AAMC practice exams, MCAT itself, AMCAS Primary, all the secondary fees and the interview process, including all the airline tickets, hotels and cab rides.
You can easily spend $70,000 before evening starting med school. Then once in med school you need to pay about $50K annually because of tuition, lab fees, book, room and board, and a job won't cut it, because studying medicine is a full time job.
So by the time you are out of med school you have $270K in debt and its actually a lot higher because interest begins acruing from day one and you can't pay any of it back until you are a resident. BUT you can't even do that because a resident makes $35K and that is pretty much the cost of living for a single person.
So you can't pay back the debt until you are an attending and making the big money and the longer you take the more the interest and the larger the interest can acrue. The total for becoming a doc can easily hit $350K all told.
So yes docs need to make a lot to make up for the ordeal we go through, a total of 8 years of school, the hell that is the med school application process and 3-4 years of residency in which we work 80 hours/week for slave wages.Of course if we changed the system so that medical school was highly subsidized or even free then we wouldn't have so much of a problem.
That is why I am opting for a career in naval medicine and hoping to get into USUHS.I will be paid $50K annually to go to med school, whose tuition, books and lab fees are all free.By living modestly, but comfortably, I can save about $70,000 over the four years I am studying there, which I will be investing in high quality small cap stocks. So while my friends come out of med school $150K in debt, I may be $150K ahead. Then during residency I will be making $60-65K about double what a civilian resident makes and able to put away even more. I will make less as a navy doc true, but with raises every 2 years and promotions every 6 I will eventually make $120K base pay, plus the housing allowance, about $20K plus various other bonuses used to retain docs in the military. So after 30 years in the navy I would be making about $165K as an internist or FP, which is about what civies make.
Then when I retire I get 75% of base pay as pension or $85K annually for the rest of my life plus healthcare for me and my wife. Combine the sweet pension, (adjusted for inflation each year) with the saving and investing I will have kept doing for 40+ years and I will retire a multi-millionaire many times over.
Here is an interesting fact, as an Physician in the military I will be a government employee working in the most socialistic organization in the country, (in exchange for doing their duty everyone in the military is guaranteed: a job, housing, food, clothing, healthcare, education and a pension) yet for most of the time I will be making almost the same as a civilian primary care doc, leading a comfortable lifestyle which I know is secure from economic downturns and retiring a very rich man.
I don't know about you, but if Obama is a socialist leading us down the road to communism and communism offers the kinds of oppertunities that the military currently offers then sign me up comrade!
