Forgiving loans could draw med students to primary care and curb a projected shortage

It's one small piece of health care reform, but it's a big deal for medical schools and doctor's offices: forgiving the student loans of doctors who choose primary care.

With fewer medical school students choosing the lower-paying fields of family medicine, internal medicine and pediatrics, lawmakers and others say something has to be done to attract them. Helping students repay their loans could help fill a shortage of general physicians that one report estimates could reach 44,000 by 2025.

"The financial burden drives very responsible people to make decisions that may not be in our state and country's best interest," said Dr. Patricia Simmons, a member of the University of Minnesota's Board of Regents and a professor at the Mayo Clinic.

Primary care physicians now make up 35 percent of today's physician workforce, according to the Council on Graduate Medical Education. Already there are shortages in some parts of the country. But only 20 percent of medical school graduates are choosing those fields. Instead, often loaded with debt, they're picking higher-paying specialties.

If health care reform allows millions of uninsured people to get regular care, more general practitioners will be needed to do their annual checkups and treat their diseases.

They'll need people like Dustin Sperr.

Sperr, 25, plans to be a doctor, and by doctor he means family physician -- the only kind there was growing up in Herman, Minn. He loves the idea of handling everything from ear infections to Alzheimer's.

"There's a lot of ownership in that kind of patient care," said Sperr, a med student at the University of Minnesota.

He'll make less in family medicine than he would with a specialty such as surgery, but that's OK with him.

He also knows that if he moves back to western Minnesota he'll qualify for loan repayment programs. State and federal programs offer providers in areas with under-served populations yearly payments toward their debt.