The Bloomberg charity has given a billion dollars to Johns Hopkins to make medical school free for its students.
This gift is misguided. Has no one noticed we don’t have enough doctors in this country??? What we need is not the same number of doctors graduating with no debt. These soon-to-be highly paid professionals (of which I am one) will do just fine without this largesse. What gifts like this should go towards is educating MORE doctors – we don’t have enough in this country, and have to import them to fill our still unmet needs. There are MANY US college grads who are smart, capable, and eager to become physicians who can’t get one of the medical school slots which our country has been restricting for decades. It’s a failing of multiple institutions: the federal government, which partially funds health education directly and indirectly; state governments, which don’t have enough medical schools for their needs except in the northeast; private universities with large endowments and gifts; the AMA and similar organizations, which wanted to maintain a high and rising income for their members. This has been a problem since the 1980s. For the past four decades, I have watched doctor’s salaries rise faster than other health care costs, to say nothing of the overall CPI, at the same time patients’ wait times lengthened.