Medical school for free?

You read that correctly. To thwart the projected shortage of primary care physicians by 2020, Peter B. Bach, the director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Robert Kocher, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, have proposed making medical school free in a May 28 New York Times article. The authors state that physicians often choose higher-paying specialties to pay off the mountains of debt they have upon graduation, so making medical school free would encourage would-be doctors to attend school and to pursue primary care rather than specialties.