man this has some good back and forth. read the whole thing and wasn’t going to comment but thought I’d share my 2 cents on a few of the topics.
Healthcare- there is no way to have the best possible care and have it for free. It’s just not possible. It’s akin to the people pushing world peace and green everything, it sounds wonderful unfortunately it just not possible, but it sounds amazing. Does anyone have any idea how much it cost to bring a drug from r and d to fda approval and to the market? How many researched that don’t work out, and the time, money , energy, and technology wasted on something. When I was in school I believe it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars to go from concept to approval. Prob more now. Then if it is approved, the patent will expire in what 20 years from applying, so you have have a limited window to recoup that investment and make up for all the other failed endevours.
When u go to hospital it cost a lot to have to have anything and everything ready or on call if needed, whether its needed right now or not, it takes a lot of time and $$$ to educate and train doctors and as technology and new techniques are always evolving, it’s not going to get cheaper to train them.
Which leads to the gov taking over the student loans- schools have increased tuition more simply because they can. It’s guaranteed money for the school. They can raise tuition every year if they want and they will get paid. If the gov wasn’t backing these loans, there is no way the free market could support the cost associated with a lot of these degrees, undergraduate and post graduate.
People tell me dentist make a lot of money, and I tell them if they are a dentist, they better make a lot of money. Look at what it cost to become a dentist. There are very few places left u can get the 8 years of school and get out for less then 300k in debt. Most places are close to the 250k mark for just dental school. So take that 300k, the inability to have a sustainable job for the most part of those years, and then the cost of buying or building a practice....... you can be easily 1 mill behind someone like my brother who has no college degree and works at a paper mill and able to bring home 75k his first year (yes it’s shift work and he’s he works a fair amount of overtime but still easily doable for him). It’s getting to the point that the return on investment of a dental education is not worth it. Tuition keeps going up and our reimbursements from ins are going down, not up. This is creating a WHOLE set of problems that is too much for this post.
I’m pretty sure medical schools were seeing the same problem also a few years ago when the quality of applicants were starting to decrease and fewer quality applicants applying.