“Surprise Gift: Free Tuition for All N.Y.U. Medical Students” (nytimes):
The New York University School of Medicine announced on Thursday that it would cover the tuition of all its students, regardless of merit or need, citing concerns about the “overwhelming financial debt” facing graduates.
N.Y.U. said that it had raised more than $450 million of the $600 million that it anticipates will be necessary to finance the tuition plan. About $100 million of that has been contributed by Kenneth G. Langone, the founder of Home Depot, and his wife, Elaine, for whom the medical school is named.
I proposed this idea for MIT back in 1998 (article), not because of a grand moral imperative but because I thought MIT wouldn’t be able to compete with Harvard for the best students. It was also an easy time to raise money due to the (first) dotcom boom/bubble that was then inflating.
Related:
- Female college professor is smarter than everyone else, but cannot find a straight man to sleep with? (NYU’s other recent moment in the national news)
- the Georgia Aquarium, funded by Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot (what would a public aquarium look like if funded/founded by Bernie Sanders?)
Healthcare supply costs, top of head, more or less in order:
– HR costs, and especially salaries, and especially doctors’ salaries;
– Infra and most especially hospital buildings;
– Drugs; and
– In the US one would have to add the insurance industry costs as significant.
Applying Pareto one would cut or cap doctors salaries at a system level. This would have the great benefit of filtering out those who enter, or acquire desire for, maximum income.
Med schools primarily admit on marks and that achievement is skewed to those by and large who can afford preparatory school (quality high school + pre-med) and fees/post-grad med school debt.
Capping salaries would have the trickle to root effect of shifting the desire to enter medicine back to more altruistic reasons.
There is probably still arguments for the brightest (proxy = highest marks) and best (rare skills) being rewarded by money, but increasingly the machines are coming for the bulk of clinical diagnosis and eventually treatment. Having the ability to hold an encyclopedic knowledge of known conditions and treatments in one’s subspecialty is less and less possible and less and less necessary.
> Applying Pareto one would cut or cap doctors salaries at a system level
Good job! Cap the doctor salaries and expand the administration. A state-owned hospital near me has three buildings, one of them is administration: mostly accounts and billing. Those are key to our healthcare!
The most senior oncology nurse (you know, that big black gal who knows it all and in control everything, and is considered a loudmouth yet the most valuable asset, way ahead of most MDs) just resigned to go to a private clinic: ya know, the rent in my (ghetto) neighborhood is getting high, and I am a single mother of two, and the private hospital gave me a hike… And it’s like a sunset at that public hospital.