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> I'm sure American doctors would pay down their debt quite quickly if they lived like a Cuban doctor and nearly their entire paycheck went to school loans. A

> I'm sure American doctors would pay down their debt quite quickly if they lived like a Cuban doctor and nearly their entire paycheck went to school loans. After medical school, doctors still aren't qualified or licensed to practice - they need to go through residency first, which pays really poorly (in some cases, less than the equivalent of minimum wage). During that time, doctors aren't going to be paying down their loans, because they're just making enough to get by. (Some doctors even end up having to take on additional debt just to get through residency. That debt comes from the private market and has a higher interest rate than the unsubsidized Stafford loans). This period lasts anywhere from 4-10 years, depending on your specialty. In the end, it's not unusual for a doctor who enters medical school in their mid-20s[0] and is not independently wealthy to expect to turn 40 before paying off their final medical school loan. Medicine isn't the unbelievably, guaranteed lucrative field people think it is. It may have been in the past, but those days are long gone, and the expected lifetime earnings for physicians continues to drop each year, which means it takes even longer to pay off your debt. [0] This is actually typical; most physicians, especially at top schools, don't enter medical school straight out of their undergraduate program

deleted 9y ago
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tiggybear 9y ago
My friends that are residents in podunk Illinois are making 65k/year. It goes very far there. Yea, if you break down all their on call hours and shit, it's not very much hourly. But they still make more than most people in their small city.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > My friends that are residents in podunk Illinois are making 65k/year. It goes very far there. $65K/year is significantly more than the average amount that a first-year resident (intern) makes ($51K/year). Also, medicine is one field where it's often much more lucrative to work in small towns than large cities, so that's the place where the discrepancy would be expected to be the largest. $51K/year is not a lot, though. That comes out to $980/week, and residents generally now work 80 hours/week (it used to be significantly longer - 100 or more). That comes out to $12.25/hour, which is actually less than minimum wage in many cities. And again, that's the average. Whether or not residents are literally making less than minimum wage, though, is not really the point: the point is that residents aren't making the kind of money that would make a significant dent in their debt, so they don't really start paying off the principal on their loans until they're done with residency (and even fellowships), which is a long time for interest to compound.

deleted 9y ago

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tiggybear 9y ago

My friends that are residents in podunk Illinois are making 65k/year. It goes very far there. Yea, if you break down all their on call hours and shit, it's not very much hourly. But they still make more than most people in their small city.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> My friends that are residents in podunk Illinois are making 65k/year. It goes very far there. $65K/year is significantly more than the average amount that a first-year resident (intern) makes ($51K/year). Also, medicine is one field where it's often much more lucrative to work in small towns than large cities, so that's the place where the discrepancy would be expected to be the largest. $51K/year is not a lot, though. That comes out to $980/week, and residents generally now work 80 hours/week (it used to be significantly longer - 100 or more). That comes out to $12.25/hour, which is actually less than minimum wage in many cities. And again, that's the average. Whether or not residents are literally making less than minimum wage, though, is not really the point: the point is that residents aren't making the kind of money that would make a significant dent in their debt, so they don't really start paying off the principal on their loans until they're done with residency (and even fellowships), which is a long time for interest to compound.