What’s The Problem?

What’s The Problem?

by digby

So Rush was blathering today about the new student loan program:

Rush urged people to avoid using government loans to pay for school because the government screws everything up. He later claimed that if you get a loan to go to medical school, when you graduate, you’ll owe Obama up to six years of service as a doctor and you’ll be forced to go to underserved areas to practice.

I don’t know specifically what he’s referring to with the medical schools, but I have thought for years that this was a good idea. The government should pay for medical school up front and then instead of facing repayment of these big loans, (necessitating charging huge fees in their practice) doctors could instead pay it back by going on salary for the first few years of their careers. It seems to me that this would hold down health care costs, allow doctors to get plenty of training at a reasonable cost and allow them to pursue the fields in which they are interested or gifted instead of the ones that will help them pay back their enormous debt before they die. It’s worked pretty well with the military.

I realize that’s a commie kind of thing, but health care just doesn’t work very well in a laissez faire capitalist system. And frankly we are going to have to reassess whether or not it makes sense that certain doctors are millionaires and others aren’t, depending on their specialty. It’s a sort of microcosm of income inequality that could at least be a tiny bit mitigated by taxpayer sponsored education.

Rush seems to think you shouldn’t even get a student loan from the government because …. well, just because. But then he’s an idiot.

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