The job of a physician is always challenging, as the doctor has to always deal with people suffering from different types of illness. Level of challenge depends upon the severity of diseases. This is quite a normal phenomenon for the doctors, one of the noble professionals in our society. We expect a lot from them that by virtue of their knowledge and experience they would detect the cause of our illness quite accurately and prescribe us the best possible remedy instantly.
This high expectation of the patients and a sense of serving among the doctors put the medical students under tremendous pressure in countries like USA, where the highest standards of patient care, diagnosis of diseases, medical treatment are maintained in the long run. A number of Acts have been enacted in the senate, among them the last one is Affordable Care Act, 2010 well known as Obama Care.
Challenges of Medical Students
The medical education system in USA is one of the most lengthy, expensive and rigorous system in the world, where a medical student has to pass through a good number of public exam. Here are some challenges have to be overcome by the Medical students in USA.
It’s a lengthy process.
The struggle for a student to become the physician starts right from the beginning of the graduation from a college, after completion of which the aspiring students get the chance to be enrolled into the Medical School by qualifying through the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT). This is a four year long course upon successful completion of which the student is eligible for residency program. This residency program varies in duration ranging from 3-7 years depending the area of specialization.
This is not the final. Physicians in US needs to be licensed through passing of U.S. Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) for M.D.s and Comprehensive Osteopathic Medical Licensing Examination (COMLEX-USA) for D.O.s. This licensing program varies from state to state. Thus it takes from 11 to 15 years to be a doctor in U.S. if the particular student is able to pass all the exam in due time.
It is expensive.
The cost of medical education isas high as its duration. It costs around $32000 per year in public medical school and $50000 per year in private medical schools. So it is cheaper to earn a medical degree from a public medical school instead of a private one. Unfortunately the door of Public medical schools are closed for foreign students. It starts from the payment of Primary application fee through the AAMC’s American Medical College Application Service to process applications, which is fixed at $160 for the first school and $39 for the successive schools from January 2018.
Secondary application fee is also charged by most of the medical schools for secondary application which may be up to $200. Then comes the MCAT exam registration fee of $315.Beside that there are additional fees for late registration, changes in registration, and appearing into the online sites of international testing. So in total a medical student has to pay $140000 to $240000 to earn the M.D. degree depending the type of medical school. Fortunately there are also some source of funding for students like scholarship and loans offered, which they can avail if they can fulfill some strictly followed criteria. However these funding are not easily available for foreign students.
All these are done to ensure the supply of quality doctors to maintain quality health program. Because public health is such an important issue that the regulatory authorities of all the times had made no compromise with this. At the same time, having the availability of sufficient number of doctors bears the same level of importance. So U.S. think tank for public health affairs should seriously try to find out an optimum balance between the both.