Federal bill would boost residency training slots

Pay for family doctors needs to go up first and foremost. There are plenty of unfilled residency positions for family practice because the pay is too low to pay back med school loans. If you are over $200,000 in debt how can you afford to support a family when you are only making $100,000 a year before taxes? And buy a house and send your kids to school and live a comfortable life? Forget it. You cannot do so comfortably, especially when simply specializing in something like dermatology will give you $400,000 a year instead. To become a doctor you must be the best of the best and you must kill yourself through 4 years of med school and 3+ years of residency, an enormous sacrifice. They reward at the end of the tunnel must be big enough to convince people it is worth it to go into family practice. These are the cold hard facts.

We need more doctors in general, but to boost family practice the pay needs to go way up.

Everyone says that we need a system like Europe, but they forget that in Europe, doctors don't come out of medical school and training with 100K or 200K of student loan debt. That is why students there can go into family medicine and OBGYN and some of these lower paying positions.

If you want a system like Europe, you also need to make medical school free for students.