06/17/2026    Paul Kesselman, DPM

Financial Strain of Medical Education-53% of Doctors Say It’s Not Worth It

Everyone with an eye to the future must heed the
call of this most recent article in Medical Economics
entitled “53% of doctor’s aren’t sure medicine is
worth it, needs to be a wake-up call not just for
the entirety of the medical profession, but more
importantly to our politicians and all of society
in general.

This article raises these interesting questions:
Can society afford to continue to allow newly
minted physicians to be saddled with debt they
can’t fully pay back until shortly before they
retire?

How can young physicians garner the ability to
save money and build a nest egg for themselves and
their families, if they are primarily working to
pay back debt?

How will the next generation pay for their
children’s education?

How can we expect our children and their children
to sacrifice the best years of their lives,
without the promise of some future economic
stability?

Also to be considered:

How many family functions, parties with friends,
vacations did you need to sacrifice to take call,
study, or simply not afford to go places when you
were younger? There always was that anticipation
that you would make it up. But now I and the
pundits are not so sure. Financial insecurity is a
real thing for anyone entering the health care
professions and it appears to be a real concern
for many interviewed for this article.

There are two takeaways cited in this article:

1) “Debt repayment led financial priorities (79%),
with student loans the dominant burden, often
displacing retirement saving, investing and
homebuying while complicating major purchase
planning”

2) Survey responses showed only 47% would still
pursue medicine under a $200,000 cap; trainees
were less willing than practicing physicians to
repeat the path.

Podiatry can be comforted that it was included in
the Big Beautiful Bill, allowing at least our
potential students to borrow up to $200K. But the
real issue is that $200K is insufficient to
finance most trainees’ medical education. Where
does the remaining private financing come from and
how does one deal with over $200,000 in debt while
trying to raise a family?

Society must fix both sides of the equation: The
escalating costs of educating a physician and the
relatively decreasing reimbursement commensurate
with the early 2000s. We can’t keep kicking the
can down the road on both of these issues.

This problem will become an even greater problem,
a Cancer if you will, eating away at our health
care system. Solutions are needed now or we face a
real crisis. Perhaps not who will be taking care
of the ageing Baby Boomers, as those physicians
have already completed their training and are
already in practice. But who will be the
physicians treating the generation following the
Boomers and those after? There is not much time to
find acutely needed solutions to fix this
festering problem.

For more on this see:
https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/53-of-
doctors-aren-t-sure-medicine-is-worth-it

Paul Kesselman, DPM, Oceanside, NY

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