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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Been following this thread and there is a lot of good information.  OP - I'm wondering if there are any medical school payment programs that wipe away debt for working in underserved areas.  They do this for teachers that work in Title 1 schools, I'm sure if you google you can find one for Doctors.  [/quote]

Unfortunately no, not for my specialty. Typically these programs are designated for those in fields designated as primary care: family practice, internal medicine, pediatrics. I actually provide lots of "primary care" every day, but the government doesn't see it that way.

Anyway one of the big programs is called public service loan forgiveness, or the PSLF program, and isn't just for docs. It applies to anyone in a "public service" role, i.e. law enforcement, teaching, public interest law, library services, etc. It was started in 2007. Under the program, you qualify for forgiveness on the remaining balance of your federal student loans after you've made 120 on-time payments while fully employed by a public service employer, so ten years in total. All payments have to have been made after 2007, so the first round of forgiveness will occur in 2017. It's a pretty good deal, and worth looking into for anyone in public service:

https://www.mygreatlakes.org/borrower/pdf/loanforgiveness/pslfFactSheet.pdf

There are some smaller forgiveness programs that are state or population specific; for docs and nurses interested in giving back to their local community or working with the Native American population. Again these are mostly dedicated for primary care. The American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) has a good database worth forwarding to any young people you know headed into the health care field:

https://services.aamc.org/fed_loan_pub/index.cfm?fuseaction=public.welcome&CFID=7563505

As you may have guessed, the existence of these programs reflect the "brain drain" that occurs in med school towards higher-paying, better quality of life subspecialties. My friends in primary care sometimes have less than 15 min/patient and spend hours on the phone with insurance companies trying to get their patient's meds/services covered. Their offices have high turnover in the staff and patient expectations are high re: wait times and doc availability by phone/email. All reasonable expectations, except it can't all happen between 9 and 5, so there's a lot of job creep. If you've had increasing trouble getting in to see your primary physician in the past couple of years, this is why.[/quote]

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