No. of Recommendations: 3
Over the lifetime of the doctor, you'll probably pay -as patients- a lot less than just the cost of the med school.
No, you wouldn't. If all you're doing is making med school free, you'd expect to see doctor compensation fall by...about the cost of med school. And everyone would pay in extra taxes...about the cost of med school. The financing costs for government are lower than for med school loans, but not really enough to be material.
Sure, having the government pay for med school gives the government some more leverage to put the screws to med school to make them be more cost efficient. But that just takes us back to our original problem, just on a smaller scale. Imposing significant costs on a small group of people (all the people who work at medical schools, from the teaching doctors down to the orderlies) gets those people very upset. Conferring a small, often invisible benefit on a large number of people doesn't get those people especially happy. The emotions are asymmetric. People hate losses much more than they enjoy gains. So the political coalition that's likely to adopt this type of proposal (ie. Democrats) is pretty unlikely to use it as a chance to put the screws to medical school faculty, much less the often-unionized staff members at teaching hospitals and whatnot.
