This Bill Could Forgive Student Loan Debt For Doctors And Nurses On Coronavirus Frontlines

As doctors, nurses, and other health care workers risk their lives to save the thousands of people with severe COVID-19 indications, they're often made to do so with subpar or makeshift personalized protective tools (PPE), grueling shifts, plus a rapidly depleting store of needed medication. Several have shifted their living situations to minimize the risk of their loved ones becoming sick, and others have stood up to orchestrated anti-social distancing protestors who are advocating for practices that would potentially result in thousands more people becoming sick with a virus for which there really is now no known vaccine. In short, they're putting up lot — as well as a lot of things that they mention they never signed up for when they chose their career paths.


Right now, several of these are lobbying the federal government to take more meaningful action than simply calling them "heroes": They want their student cash advance debts forgiven.


A MoveOn petition began three weeks back has amassed over 500,000 signatures; addressed to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), as well as Speaker of the Home Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Home minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the petition asks lawmakers to "include cash advance forgiveness for all nutritionists in the second stimulus package because those workers "are doing heroic and selfless service to our nation. Soon after World War II, Congress thanked our soldiers by passing the GI Bill so that they could get a college education. This could be the same." A separate Change.Org petition, directed at President Donald Trump and congressional leaders, has garnered over 250,000 signatures.


According to statistics from the Association of American Medical Professionals released in October 2019, a total of 73 percent of medical students graduate with student cash advance debt, and their average debt clocks in at $201,490. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing reported in 2017 that, on average, nurses graduate their programs with anywhere from $40,000 and $54,999 in debt, and that can take decades to pay off: A 2019 Medscape survey noticed that 20 percent of nurses aged 55 or older were still paying off their student loans.


"We desire to go out and take care of people. Nobody becomes a doctor for the cash Dr. Andrew Tisser, an emergency physician in New York who signed the Change.Org petition, told NBC News.


Like several inequities laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic, the severe debt saddling health care workers has only exacerbated already strained systems. In 2017, NPR announced on a shortage of doctors in rural areas, given that several cannot afford to open their own practices and continue to pay their student cash advance debt. Some states have already proven that relief is possible: In 2019, California introduced a new program that would relieve doctors of up to $300,000 in student cash advance debt if they agree to take Medi-Cal insurance for low-income patients. And while some health care providers use the Public Service Cash advance Forgiveness program to work towards cash advance forgiveness, few people were approved for such forgiveness between 2018 and 2019, largely owing to a paperwork technicality.


On April 12, Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) introduced the Student Debt Forgiveness for Frontline Health Care Workers Act, which would "eliminate graduate school debt for health care workers who are allocating direct patient care in response to the COVID-19 pandemic."


"The least we can do to recognize their service is to forgive their graduate student cash advance debt so that they are not forced to worry about their financial wellbeing additionally to their health and the health of their families if they respond to a public health emergency," she mentioned in a statement.


And while Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) has equally called for frontline workers to receive hazard pay while in the pandemic, some doctors don't believe an overtime plan of action is enough.


"I'm looking at a student cash advance debt of $318,000," Dr. Manuel "Trey" Penton III, a pediatric infectious infection physician in New York, told ABC News. "That few added thousand dollars, while it might make a big difference to some people, for me, most of that cash is going to go back inside paying off my student cash advance debt.


Elizabeth May, another physician in New York, agreed: "Four years into residency, and approximately $20,000 in cash advance payments later, I am still scraping away at the interest," of the debt she accrued in medical school, she wrote for The Intercept. "I owe more than Whenever I graduated."