New student loan cap under Trump could threaten CA health care

Tucked inside the sweeping budget bill that President Donald Trump signed earlier this month is a provision to slash the amount of money medical school students can borrow in federal loans. While the new rule will directly affect medical students, it could also have substantial impacts on Californians across the state seeking medical care.

As CalMatters’ Mikhail Zinshteyn and Kristen Hwang explain, starting July 1, 2026, the cap for federal debt professional degree students can incur will be $50,000 annually and $257,000 for the life of a student’s college journey, including undergraduate debt. Grad PLUS loans, a type of federal student aid for graduate students, will also be eliminated. 

The new law will affect all graduate programs, but since medical school typically requires more than $300,000 for tuition, housing and other expenses — which can take decades to repay — many are likely to turn to private loans. Private loans have fewer protections, can charge higher interest rates and don’t offer loan forgiveness.

• Calvin Yang, a rising senior at UC Berkeley who wants to attend medical school: “It’s frustrating to see restrictions on our ability to simply want to pursue an education in order to help the world, right? Long COVID persists. Mental health remains a major issue, diabetes, obesity — those all require medical professionals.”

Because the law creates a higher financial barrier for students to attend medical school, particularly for low-income students, experts argue that the pool of prospective doctors would not only shrink, it would also become less diverse.

That’s a problem for California, which like the rest of the country has a shortage of primary care physicians. In addition to maternity wards and rural hospitals closing across the state, California’s Central Coast, Central Valley and Southern Border are projected to have the most severe physician shortages. 

• Dr. Mahima Iyengar, a medical resident at the Los Angeles General Medical Center: “We want a diverse group of people taking care of patients, because we know that patients have better outcomes from providers that understand where they’ve come from.”

Read more here.

Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains is eyeing a bid for Congress. The Bakersfield Democrat and physician announced today that she is running to replace Republican Rep. David Valadao next November, reports CalMatters’ Maya C. Miller.

Bains was elected to the Assembly in 2022 and has garnered a reputation as a moderate who sometimes breaks ranks with her party. As the lone Democrat who voted against a 2023 law backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to penalize oil companies for alleged price gouging, Bains was temporarily stripped of a committee post by the Assembly speaker at the time.

She will challenge an incumbent who has represented the San Joaquin Valley in Congress for 10 of the last 12 years. Before Trump signed the federal budget bill, Valadao repeatedly pledged that he would not support any measure that would harm Medi-Cal recipients. But each time the measure came before him, Valadao voted to advance the bill.

More than two-thirds of Valadao’s district, which includes parts of Kings, Tulare and Kern counties, are on Medi-Cal. Together with his eight other California GOP colleagues in the House, they represent 2.5 million Medi-Cal enrollees. 

Read more here.

Could students relying on chatbots to assist with their assignments be missing out on human social connections that could have proven valuable? Some education experts think so, writes CalMatters’ Tara García Mathewson.

Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude can be useful for students to quickly generate information on study topics, draft essay outlines or serve as a starting point for career advice. But for every chatbot query they seek, it could mean one fewer meaningful interaction with a classmate, professor, tutor or others who could have offered students deeper insight.

• Julia Freeland-Fisher, director of education at the Clayton Christensen Institute, a nonprofit research organization: “Over time, that means students have fewer and fewer people in their corner who can help them in other moments of struggle, who can help them in ways a bot might not be capable of.”

In a study published in March by the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI, researchers found that frequent users of ChatGPT were more likely to be lonely and isolated from human interaction. But by nurturing human connections, experts say, students can expand their social network and build social capital — forging relationships with others who could end up being a good friend, business partner or job lead. 

Read more here.

A new study looking into the economic effects of the federal administration’s spring immigration raids in California found that the state’s private-sector job market notably shrunk, including for U.S. citizens. Find out by how much from CalMatters’ Levi Sumagaysay.