The Hidden Costs of Medical Student Debt

Pauline Chen:

He was a senior surgeon many of us in training wanted to emulate -- smart, busy and beloved by patients and staff. But we loved him most because he could have been any one of us. He had slogged through the same training program some 15 years earlier, and he had survived.

I caught up with him one afternoon during my internship, hoping to glean some wisdom, but all he could talk about was how he was going to be seeing patients less and focusing on his dream of improving hospital quality and efficiency. "Don't get me wrong," he said. "I love caring for patients." But the stress of keeping a practice afloat was wearing him down.

"Plus the monkey is finally off my back now," he said with an enormous grin. "I paid off my last student loan."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 2, 2011 1:46 AM
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