Down in the Mouth

If you are lucky enough to get into medical, law or business schools (graduate level), you will find that the tuition in such “professional” graduate programs is often double or even triple the cost of undergraduate tuition. To make a bad situation disgusting, scholarship grants in these bastions of higher learning are pretty low to non-existent, so students are encouraged to borrow themselves silly to pay for school. We’re not talking $10-$20K per year; we’re looking at $60K or more per year! These loans are costing more and their availability in a credit-impaired marketplace, with limits to total government loans, is beyond challenging.

With jobs getting scarce and an economy contracting, exactly how are these folks supposed to pay off loans that were assumed to be “easy” because the graduate was entering a “well-paid profession”? Add really low-paying internships and residencies required of doctors followed by “managed care” fees and skyrocketing, often six figure-a-year cost of malpractice insurance, and its gets downright skanky. Okay, maybe you’re not feelin’ it for the lawyers or the business grads (they’re hurting! Some of them do public interest law, become public defenders, represent the poor or run charitable organizations. And their parents were once proud!), but maybe you’ll be feeling in where it really hurts the most – in your body or in your mouth!

The economics of professional school are getting pretty bad, and young bright minds wanting to be medical practitioners, from medical doctors to dentists, are making “other choices” because of costs. There are large parts of the United States where there simply aren’t enough doctors to deal with the issues, dentists are so rare that there might not be one for hundreds of miles. Shortages affect urban areas too, and with a national healthcare system, we are simply going to have to create parallel financial support for medical aspirants at every level.

So you already probably know of the shortage of doctors, particularly family and general practitioners, but I stumbled across a little article in the May 29^th Los Angeles Times, about dentists… not a very sexy topic, but if you’ve ever had a toothache, well… this bud’s for you!

While the study was about California, the story applies all across this great land. There’s one area in the state, Hollister, San Benito County, where a UCLA survey shows five working dentists for about 58,000 people! And there are several counties where there is one dentist for every 4-5,000 people.

The Times: “The shortage situation may worsen in some already-underserved areas because new dentists are not keeping pace with those retiring… Because dentists often leave school with between $200,000 and $300,000 in loans, setting up practice in areas where patients rely on government-sponsored insurance that pays only 30 to 40 cents on the dollar can be hard, said Cathy Mudge, chief administrative officer of the California Dental Assn.”

In California, there is already talk of programs where folks who used to get student loans forgiven by doing stuff like “teaching public school” or “public service law” are going to be hacked to financial death in the current budget crisis… oh, and that state university tuition is going up to make up for the big budget deficit; the only news seems to be bad.

In a world where North Koreans are testing nukes, the Pakistanis are making more nukes as they are attacked by Taliban, as home prices continue to reinvent the “floor,” as jobs disappear faster than gamblers during a police raid and credit is frozen like a polar ice cap in winter, stuff like who will take care of you even if you have health insurance can fall between the cracks of global despair.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I’m here to remind you once and a while about stuff, important stuff.