Healthcare Daily Digest for Monday, 8 April: The Ugly Confluence of Medical and Student Loan Debt

The Idaho Statesman is running a story about a young man, Brandon Prince, and his unfortunate combination of debts: “Prince owes more than $80,000 combined to student lenders and to St. Luke’s Health System, for a culinary degree and an emergency hospital visit.”

On the right side of the page are two brief stories, related to Prince’s primary woes: one titled “Student Loans Burden Graduates.”

“Conventional wisdom that a college degree is a good investment is backed up by research: College graduates have higher lifetime earnings and are more likely to have jobs, even in a bad economy. That’s partly why students in the U.S. have signed up for $1 trillion in debt to pay for school.”

But maybe not a degree in the culinary arts?

Look: I get it. You want to make a bechamel sauce or a flan or whatever, and you want to open your own restaurant. Sure. It just seems, more and more, that we’re calling something — a college degree, for instance — a good investment without going into more detail of HOW it’s a good investment. Prince himself admits finding restaurant work, even with a culinary degree, was impossible. Throw in the kidney stone ailment, and you can see how Prince could end up $80+ thousand in debt.

Monday’s headlines:

Because What Warren Buffet Likes, Warren Buffet gets: “Warren Buffett knows what he likes — and he gets what he likes. While he is widely known for investing in consumer product companies, another industry has also captured his attention and his money. Here are three things Buffett really likes about health care.”

Explaining Healthcare to Consumers: “The plan to insure as many as 27 million Americans under the federal health law beginning this fall will be the biggest expansion of health coverage since that launch. Millions will be eligible to shop for insurance in the new online marketplaces, which open for enrollment Oct. 1 with the coverage taking effect Jan. 1.”

Computer Experts Say Computers are the Future: “Use of information technology (IT) is the future of affordable and accountable healthcare system, opined experts and eminent persons on Saturday. They advocated maximizing the use of IT to curb ‘medical errors.’“