PHOTO BY ZACH ADAMS
Dr. Jerry Kruse, dean of SIU School of Medicine and CEO of SIU Medicine, far left, speaks at a press conference July 25. He is joined by several SIU doctors and Sen. Dick Durbin, far right.
Sen. Dick Durbin, joined by members of the Southern Illinois University medical network on Friday, warned of the federal administration’s decisions that will impact aspiring doctors, rural hospitals and scientific research.
Discussing provisions within the new federal tax law and the decision to cap federal education loans, Durbin said medical students – who will be subject to maximum loans of $50,000 per year, $200,000 total – will have to either abandon their dream of being a doctor or take out high-interest private loans. Currently, an individual’s cost of attendance is the limit of what one can borrow.
“These doctors will have even more medical debt when they come out of medical school,” he said. “This is going to have an impact on the number and quality of doctors in the United States of America, at a time when we desperately, desperately need more.”
Also on Friday, Durbin and Sen. Tammy Duckworth sent letters to every hospital in Illinois asking administrators how much they expect to be affected by Medicaid cuts.
Illinois is a midwestern hub of medical training programs with almost 1,000 programs across the state for health professionals to enroll in, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, the fifth most of any state.
Dr. Kari Schwertman, a family physician at SIU Medicine, explained that her unconventional path toward becoming a doctor was made possible by government loans.
“I wasn’t always a doctor; I was an elementary school teacher, then a stay-at-home mom,” Schwertman said. Eventually, she went to SIU School of Medicine as a first-generation medical student once her oldest child was in preschool. “For a young family, this was extremely challenging, both logistically and absolutely financially. I would not have been able to accomplish this without the assistance of student loans.”
Durbin said the move will decrease the diversity of doctors in Springfield and the rest of the state, calling the Trump administration’s attack on foreign workers “mindless” and “cruel.” He also criticized the decision to cut medical research funding for the National Institutes of Health and limit Medicaid availability.
“When you look at the roster of medical professionals in this community and other communities across our state, you’ll notice one thing that’s obvious – many of them are newcomers to the United States. They are immigrants to our country who come here because of the great medical schools and they fall in love with America and want to stay here and practice medicine, and thank goodness for us they do,” he said.
“This war that this administration has declared on foreign students is mindless. To say to these brilliant, young students, ‘Stay away. We don’t trust you, you’re from another country,’ that is a mindless position. It’s a mean position, it’s cruel,” Durbin said.
Dr. Haneme Idrizi, a pediatrician and dean for student affairs at SIU School of Medicine, echoed the concerns of cost for families that moved to America, as her parents once did. She said she “would not have been able to go to medical school without access to federal loans.”
Idrizi now has concern for SIU medical students who will experience limits on what the government will loan them.
“Changes to the federal student aid program, including the elimination of Direct PLUS loans and the borrowing caps, will significantly impact our students,” she said. “Our rural future depends on today’s students being able to afford a path to medicine.”
SIU School of Medicine has hundreds of medical students, graduate students and resident physicians, according to Dr. Jerry Kruse, dean of SIU School of Medicine and CEO of SIU Medicine.
Kruse raised concern over the Trump administration’s desire to limit what the federal government covers for research overhead at 15%, a move that was most recently overturned by a federal judge. He said cutting research funding would dash what inspires so many students and scientists.
“The cut of (facilities and administration costs) to 15% is not enough to support research,” Kruse said. “That would be devastating to us, and it would be millions of dollars that we couldn’t use to support research.”