[Matt Flynn]

If your dither is between nursing school and med school, consider becoming a physician assistant. You will have prescribing authority and the ability to see patients on your own. It is two years after a premed-type bachelor degree, then you learn on the job. There is very high demand. Salaries range 60-180K with most senior ones making around 80-100K. You can be in primary care or specialize. Satisfaction is generally high.

Nursing is in high demand, but the jobs mostly suck. Way too much paperwork and supervising often-undertrained nursing assistants. Also too many patients at once. If you like the ICU, though, that's a great nursing job. Tremendous responsibility.

Med school and residency takes 7-10 years for most docs and is exhausting. I would strongly advise against going to medical school if your intent is to go into primary care. With the proposed Medicare cuts and additional paperwork burden coming (hard to fathom it could get worse, but along comes "pay for performance" and the Medicare drug benefit), it is not clear whether many primary care practices will survive: at some point they will either have to adapt procedures to make up the revenue shortfall caused by low pay for office visits or they will go bankrupt. E.g., in a typical well-run hardworking internal medicine practice, the physicians make the marginal 30% of the revenue that comes in and make 100-170K for a 50-hour week. The current Medicare pay scale plans would cut Medicare by 26% over the next 5 years. All the other insurance plans peg to Medicare and will drop their reimbursement. Physicians do not control how much they get paid. So it is simple economics. You will see more boutique practices and more conglomerate healthcare with each doc supervising 2-3 physician assistants and serving as backup for nurse practitioners, carrying full liability for anything those supervisees do or do not do with little control over the process.

Interesting point: legal liability costs are not the biggest problem. Bureaucracy imposed by the givernment and insurance companies costs more. My practice is typical for my specialty: with two providers we have essentially 12 full-time employees. In 1970 the average was about 4.5. That is the bureaucracy cost difference, and it is tremendously expensive at an average of 40K/year per employee.

Also, I would not underestimate the growing hatred and mistrust of physicians in the U.S.

Not saying don't do it, but be realistic about what you are getting into.