Medical school tuition "forgiveness"...are you kidding?

The New York Times presents the case of too many customers for primary care providers and why the idea of forgiveness for medical school debt is the newest brainchild of doing anything but directly pursuing consumer needs of Access, affordability, quality, health services (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/05/us/05doctors.html?th&emc=th). The article ironically floats the idea of paying for physician educations while emphasizing the problem that consumers can't get to see doctors when they want to...so instead of solving the problem, we should pay to perpetuate it. My comment to the article follows but there are more questions...for instance, why are mere consumers better able to identify problems than governmental types? The answer is the boots on the ground experience that only consumers can give.

Medical school forgiveness? Meaning that government will pay for medical school? Medical students should not be "encouraged" to join primary care practices by having free medical school unless MEDICAL SCHOOLS are offering the free education to their students through interest free loans that can be repaid to the medical school over ten years after graduation. Consumers are being asked to pay for everything, there is no incentive for improvement in the health services industry--primary care practices use the services of nurses, physician assistants, should the taxpayer pay for their educations too? If the profit margin isn't big enough for physicians then they won't practice medicine. Why should we care when we are already being told that there is insufficient access to physicians--meaning we can't get to see a doctor when we want anyway--why pay to maintain a status quo of not being able to see a physician when we want. This is the oldest marketing trick on the books, market something through scarcity in order to raise the feeling that we have to support it at any cost or we may not have it at all...no. (Also, liked the plug for more "preventive" services, those money making favorites of health services providers and insurers rather than those seeking "episodic" care, meaning seeking care when they're sick.)