Medical students increasingly spurning primary care

The Baltimore Sun reports: "Ryan Circh's heart is drawn to family medicine, but his head - fixated on his daunting student loans and the uncertainties of health care reform - is leading him toward emergency or sports medicine. The 24-year-old studying medicine at the University of Maryland is probably another potential primary care physician lost. In the school's most recent graduating medical school class, more than a third pursued internal and family medicine." His decision "reflects a nationwide trend, according to the National Resident Matching Program, whose figures show about a third of graduating students are going into primary care, a number that's been dropping fairly steadily over the last generation." Medical students "face a debt approaching $150,000 when they leave medical school" (Rosen, 9/29).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.